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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   25556 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 18, 2025

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Trump's civil fraud convictions (regarding intentional misvaluation of properties) have been upheld by the state appeals panel. I hope that distilling the three opinions down from 230 letter-size pages to something slightly more digestible counts as sufficiently high effort for a top-level comment.

(1) Moulton, joined by Renwick: All the convictions and most of the penalties should be upheld, but the sanctions against Trump's lawyers and the disgorgement penalties against Trump should be reversed.

This decision is one of three issued by this Court today. Presiding Justice Renwick and I agree with our colleagues on certain points. Most importantly, we agree with Justice Higgitt, who is joined by Justice Rosado, that the Attorney General is empowered by Executive Law § 63(12) to bring this action. However, our remaining disagreements with our colleagues' decisions are profound. In sum, Justice Friedman finds that Supreme Court's rulings are infirm in almost every respect and would hold that the Attorney General had no power to bring this case under Executive Law § 63(12). He would dismiss the complaint outright. Justice Higgitt, while agreeing that the Attorney General had the power to bring this lawsuit, finds that errors made by Supreme Court require a new trial limited to only some of the transactions in question.

Because none of the three decisions garners a majority, Justices Higgitt and Rosado join the decretal of this decision for the sole purpose of ensuring finality, thereby affording the parties a path for appeal to the Court of Appeals. Like Justice Friedman, we commend them for doing so. Unlike Justice Friedman, we do not find that this necessary measure is unfair to defendants.

This Court has already ruled in Trump I that the facts of this case warrant the application of Executive Law § 63(12), and that the Attorney General is vindicating the public interest in challenging the transactions in question. The law of the case doctrine "is designed to eliminate the inefficiency and disorder that would follow if courts of coordinate jurisdiction were free to overrule one another in an ongoing case". This Court departs from the doctrine only when a prior holding is clearly erroneous, or where there has been a change in law or evidence. None of those circumstances are present here. Defendants cannot relitigate the issue of the scope of Executive Law § 63(12) under the guise that Trump I that was decided at the motion to dismiss stage (where the Attorney General is entitled to the presumption of the truth of her allegations and the benefit of all favorable inferences), as opposed to the summary judgment stage (where the Attorney General is held to the record evidence).

In this appeal, we have before us an actual record which demonstrates clearly that defendants committed fraud and illegality squarely within the ambit of Executive Law § 63(12). We do not have before us some hypothetical future misuse of the statute. The record also refutes Justice Friedman's implication that the judicial system is being used for "political ends" in this litigation. The antithesis is true. Given the evidence uncovered during the Attorney General's investigation, which is discussed at length below, the "political" choice would have been to not bring this case, thereby avoiding a fight with a powerful adversary. Her allegations have been tested at every stage of this maximalist litigation and for the most part have been upheld. We now have before us the evidence the Attorney General amassed and it demonstrates that defendants engaged in a decade-long pattern of financial fraud and illegality.

Supreme Court correctly awarded partial summary judgment to the Attorney General, and correctly denied defendants' motion for summary judgment, after determining that the Attorney General proved that there were no triable issues of fact concerning the Executive Law § 63(12) cause of action insofar as it was based on fraud (not illegality). This type of section 63(12) claim is sometimes called a "standalone claim" because it is not predicated on violation of another statute.

The record before the court on summary judgment was voluminous. However, volume does not inevitably demonstrate the existence of issues of fact. For the reasons set forth below, we find that the record made on summary judgment clearly demonstrates defendants' liability under Executive Law § 63(12). Moreover, as discussed in section C below, even if Supreme Court erred in granting summary judgment to the Attorney General, the record at trial overwhelmingly supports Supreme Court's finding of liability for violations of the Penal Law.

Our colleagues agree with Presiding Justice Renwick and me that Supreme Court improvidently levied sanctions on defendants' attorneys. The parties in this litigation had to contend with novel legal issues. In grappling with these issues, defendants offered colorable arguments in their defense. Consequently, their arguments were not "completely without merit" under 22 NYCRR 130-1.1(c)(1). Defendants' summary judgment papers certainly repeated arguments advanced in opposition to the Attorney General's motion for a preliminary injunction and in their motions to dismiss the complaint. However, the court made no findings that the arguments were made primarily to delay or prolong the litigation or to harass or maliciously injure the Attorney General under 22 NYCRR 130-1.1(c)(2).

While we find that Supreme Court erred in imposing sanctions, Justice Friedman is incorrect in divining that this somehow reflects a subliminal "tacit" conclusion that Supreme Court was biased against defendants. We agree that Supreme Court's two decisions are sometimes conclusory and insufficiently rigorous in their legal analysis. However, in the pressured environment of a heavily scrutinized trial Supreme Court produced a clear and complete record for this Court to review. In the course of reading and re-reading that record we found that the court was even-handed at trial, and allowed both sides to "make their case."

For the reasons set forth above, we find that Supreme Court properly awarded partial summary judgment on the standalone claim. We disagree with Justice Higgitt's view that Supreme Court engaged in improper fact-finding and credibility determinations in its summary judgment decision. However, even if my colleagues are correct that Supreme Court erred on summary judgment, we also have before us an extensive trial record that amply establishes defendants' liability. At the bench trial Supreme Court was not constrained by the rules of summary judgment. Fact-finding and credibility determinations are among the central tasks of a judge presiding over a bench trial. As set forth below, our de novo review of the trial record supports Supreme Court's findings of illegality. Accordingly, there is no need to remand for another trial.

In connection with our review of the Posttrial Order, we defer to the court's findings that the testimony of President Trump, Donald Trump, Jr., Eric Trump, Jeffrey McConney and Allen Weisselberg were not credible, and that the testimony of Michael Cohen was credible. The court cited various reasons for finding that the individual defendants' testimony was not credible which, depending on the witness, included obfuscation, equivocation, evasiveness, gaps in memory, and initial denials until being confronted with contrary evidence. Although Michael Cohen acknowledged at trial that he had pled guilty to perjury, the court nevertheless found his testimony credible, noting the general plausibility of his statements, his demeanor, and the fact that his testimony was corroborated by other trial evidence.

While he is silent concerning Supreme Court's findings that the individual defendants were not credible witnesses, Justice Friedman chooses to devote a number of pages to his own analysis of Cohen's lack of credibility. He quotes at length from Cohen's testimony and draws his own conclusions about its veracity. We do not parse Justice Friedman's exegesis on Cohen's credibility—and do not conduct our own credibility determinations of Cohen or of any other witness—because that is not the job of an appellate judge. Credibility determinations are for the judge who presides at a bench trial. "In a nonjury trial, we defer to the findings of the trial court 'unless it is obvious that the court's conclusions could not be reached under any fair interpretation of the evidence, especially when the findings of fact rest in large measure on considerations relating to the credibility of witnesses'".

Applying the appropriate standard of review, we find that the record amply supports Supreme Court's determination that the Attorney General established, by a preponderance of the evidence, that the individual defendants violated Executive Law § 63(12) by violating New York Penal Law §§ 175.05 (falsifying business records in the second degree), 175.45 (issuing a false financial statement), 176.10 (insurance fraud in the fifth degree),[FN52] and 105.00 (conspiracy in the sixth degree). The evidence, in turn, also established the liability of the corporate defendants by operation of Penal Law § 20.20.

Although the court heard at trial all of the expert testimony that Justice Higgitt viewed as necessary to decide this lawsuit at the summary judgment stage, he nevertheless concludes that defendants were deprived of a fair trial. According to Justice Higgitt, the court's improper "focus and reliance on magnitude of disparity" at the summary judgment stage continued into the trial and affected the court's assessment of whether the individual defendants possessed the requisite intent to defraud under the relevant Penal Law provisions. Justice Higgitt also maintains that the court improperly admitted evidence related to time-barred transactions, which, when superimposed on the court's misunderstanding of materiality, requires a new trial.

We disagree. Because this Court's authority in reviewing a nonjury decision is as broad as that of the trial court and because the trial record before us is clear and complete, there is no need for a new trial. In other words, we are not bound by any legal or fact-finding errors made by Supreme Court at trial.[FN55] In addition, contrary to Justice Higgitt's position, the court's misunderstanding of materiality at the summary judgment stage had no bearing on the court's assessment of the individual defendants' intent to defraud in connection with the relevant Penal Law provisions. As Justice Higgitt acknowledges, intent to defraud is an element under the Penal Law (but is not an element under Executive Law § 63[12]) and looks only to a defendant's state of mind.

The remaining question is whether the disgorgement levied against the defendants in this case is an excessive fine barred by the Eighth Amendment. We believe that it is.

A fine is excessive when it is "grossly disproportional to the gravity of the defendant's offense". Defendants' attempt to deny the gravity of their actions with blithe claims that none of the counterparties were harmed ignores a core reality: a bank making a loan seeks not only repayment, but also compensation for the possibility of default. Nicholas Haigh, the managing director of the Deutsche Bank Private Wealth Management Division, the entity that approved the three loans issued by that Bank herein, testified that "just getting repaid on the principal" of the loan "doesn't address at all whether we got properly recompensed for the risk we were taking." However, while harm certainly occurred, it was not the cataclysmic harm that can justify a nearly half billion-dollar award to the State. It is a virtue of the statute that the Attorney General may act, as she did in this case, before a potential catastrophe occurs, to deter further fraudulent business behavior by defendants specifically, and to police market behavior generally. However, having achieved these goals the State is not entitled to compound its victory with a massive punitive fine.

The Attorney General did not carry her initial burden. Indeed, the calculation of the disgorgement in this case was far from a reasonable approximation. Contrary to Supreme Court's finding, the profits from sales of the Ferry Point License and the sale of the OPO Lease (which, in tandem, accounted for $194.8 million of the disgorgement awarded plus a substantial amount of interest) were not "reasonable approximation[s] of profits causally connected" to defendants' wrongdoing.

For the foregoing reasons, we vacate the portions of the Posttrial Order directing disgorgement in its entirety.

This does not leave the Attorney General without a remedy. In contrast to its order on disgorgement, Supreme Court properly granted injunctive relief.

On the record before us, we find that Supreme Court properly exercised its discretion in awarding injunctive relief. Defendants persistently and intentionally inflated the asset values reported in their SFCs from 2014 to 2021, for numerous assets per each SFC. Despite the wrongfulness of their conduct, Supreme Court believed that defendants lacked remorse. Indeed, when asked at trial whether he still approved of McConney and Weisselberg's work in preparing the SFCs, President Trump stated "[y]ou haven't shown me anything that would change my mind."

Contrary to defendants' arguments, Supreme Court's injunctive relief was not "breathtakingly overbroad." The Court of Appeals recognized in Greenberg that lifetime bans on business activity may not "be a justifiable exercise of a court's discretion". Even so, the majority of Supreme Court's injunctive relief spanned two or three years. The court's only permanent injunction barred McConney and Weisselberg—who were primarily responsible for preparing the SFCs and maintaining the Trump Organization's books and records—from controlling the finances of a New York corporation or business entity. Considering the significant likelihood that defendants would reoffend, Supreme Court's injunctions were measured and fair.

(2) Higgitt, joined by Rosado: The convictions should be vacated for a new trial. However, in the interest of finality, we will concur in Moulton's opinion so that it has a majority and can be appealed to the state Court of Appeals (supreme court), rather than having Engoron's opinion "vacated by an equally divided court".

We and our colleagues generally agree on the facts and evidence. On the import of those facts and evidence, however, we differ with our colleagues—in reasoning, result, or both—on a number of fundamental issues, and the path this action should now take.

For the reasons that follow, we conclude that the judgment must be vacated and a new trial ordered.[FN2]

[FN2]Notwithstanding our analysis, as reflected in our writing, that vacatur of the judgment and a new trial is the appropriate resolution, Justice Rosado and I, after much consideration, with great reluctance and with acknowledgement of the incongruity of the act, join the decretal modifying the judgment to the extent of vacating the disgorgement and sanctions awards. Under the truly extraordinary circumstances here, where none of the writings enjoys the support of a majority, we are moved to take this action to permit this panel to arrive at a decision and to permit the parties and the Court to avoid the necessity of reargument. Moreover, joining the decretal effectuates the core point of agreement among the members of this panel: that the judgment, as entered by Supreme Court, cannot stand. The parties must have a decision on this matter and, concomitantly, the option of further review of this matter by the Court of Appeals, as recognized by Justice Friedman. We must therefore agree with Justice Friedman in his observation that a remarkable situation has necessitated a remarkable solution.

Our colleagues have thoroughly and thoughtfully examined and analyzed the parties' arguments and proof and Supreme Court's determinations, reaching opposite conclusions. We find that the application of the same well-known fundamental summary judgment principles leads to the conclusion that summary judgment was improperly granted to the Attorney General. Supreme Court did not view the evidence in the light most favorable to defendants, as the nonmovants; it resolved, rather than identified, questions of material fact; and it did so by applying its own interpretive standard to the evidence without explicitly finding defendants' experts to be incredible as a matter of law or rejecting the bases for their multi-pronged analyses. Central to the motions and Supreme Court's decision, and indeed the action itself, was the valuation of the various assets listed in the SFCs. Defendants argue that Supreme Court's rejection of the expert evidence they submitted in opposition to the Attorney General's motion affected every valuation decision Supreme Court made, and fatally infected the subsequent trial.

Supreme Court found (correctly) that materiality was not an element of the Executive Law § 63(12) fraud claim but recognized (correctly) that it is "relevant" to determining "tendency or capacity." Supreme Court found that the magnitude of the difference between defendants' and the Attorney General's valuations, alone, was material and, in essence, the single factor informing "tendency or capacity." According to Supreme Court,

OAG has submitted conclusive evidence that between 2014 and 2021, defendants overvalued the assets reported in the SFCs between 17.27-38.51%; this amounts to a discrepancy of between $812 million and $2.2 billion dollars. Even in the world of high finance, this Court cannot endorse a proposition that finds a misstatement of at least $812 million dollars to be 'immaterial.' Defendants have failed to identify any authority for the notion that discrepancies of the magnitude demonstrated here could be considered immaterial.

Supreme Court's rejection of defendants' evidence reduces to an unwarranted (i.e. the Attorney General had not offered competent competing evidence) rejection of the notion of a subjective appraisal. In doing do, Supreme Court relied on an inapt case, its interpretation of which was flawed. Supreme Court stated, "Accepting defendants' premise would require ignoring decades of controlling authority holding that financial statements and real property valuations are to be judged objectively, not subjectively".

For the proposition that subjectivity has no place in real property valuation, Supreme Court cited Matter of FMC Corp. and Assured Guar. Mun. Corp. v DLJ Mortg. Cap. Inc. For the proposition that market value is the most reliable valuation method, it cited Matter of Great Atl, & Pac. Tea Co. v Kiernan and Matter of Consolidated Edison Co. of N.Y., Inc. v City of New York. These cases are of little to no value with respect to examination, let alone resolution, of the issues presented by the motions.

It bears noting that no one, including Supreme Court, identified, as a matter of law or fact, singular, correct inputs from which valuation methods should have emanated. Supreme Court declined to acknowledge the validity of alternate valuation methods, disregarding that every method of valuation ultimately seeks the same goal. Therefore, Supreme Court's usage of the word "appraisal" did very little to help us stratify valuation methods into echelons of accuracy. Our jurisprudence with respect to property interests teaches us that every parcel of property is unique, meaning, therefore, that similarly situated properties cannot be presumed to have identical value for comparison. Further, value is made up of many intangible factors, such as proximity to a geographical or topographical feature, remoteness from the nearest neighboring property, and cache, none of which has anything to do with the features of the actual parcel or the construction of the actual structures. The premise from which Supreme Court set out, therefore, was a false one. This is borne out by the fact that the Attorney General was able to identify only very specific misstatements that were truly, objectively "wrong," as opposed to inflated or creative, even expansively so, which is not necessarily fraudulent, given the breadth of permissible valuation methods.

Considering the effect of our prior determination and all applicable tolls afforded by the agreement and the various Executive Orders issued during the coronavirus pandemic, the correct date for determining the timeliness of all claims against all defendants is July 13, 2014. Supreme Court thus erred when it considered instances of false statements with respect to the Doral and Chicago loans, both of which closed prior to July 13, 2014, in calculating damages, awarding injunctive relief, and in directing judgment against any defendants alleged to have participated in only those transactions. The exclusion of untimely transactions significantly reduces Supreme Court's disgorgement award. The $168,040,168 award based on interest rate differentials must be reduced by the $72,908,308 attributable to the Doral loan and the $17,443,359 attributable to the Chicago loan, for a reduced total of $77,688,500, assuming Supreme Court used the correct metrics in making the award.

The impact of Supreme Court's erroneous interpretation of our prior holding with respect to the statute of limitations on its posttrial disgorgement award is not harmless. This is true not merely mathematically, but also foundationally. Given the unique nature of the Executive Law § 63(12) cause of action and the relief afforded by it, we cannot know the evidentiary significance of otherwise-excludable SFCs and transactions to the primary determinations required for a successful Executive Law § 63(12) claim. We cannot know whether or to what extent the consideration of otherwise-excludable SFCs or transactions influenced the finding of repetition or persistence of defendants' acts or statements, or whether their consideration produced a course of repetition or persistence that influenced the decision to grant any aspect of the injunctive and other non-monetary relief awarded, whether at the motion or trial stage, the type of relief, the nature of the relief, or the severity of the relief, such as its duration or breadth.[FN29] While the granting of such relief is not mandatory when the cause of action is made out, it bears noting that this is the primary form of relief envisioned by Executive Law § 63(12).

Accordingly, Supreme Court's statute of limitations finding, together with the other fundamental errors described above, merits, among other things, a new trial.

We and our colleagues agree that granting the motion for sanctions was an improvident exercise of discretion; that defense counsels' conduct could not be fairly characterized as "egregious," "preposterous," "inscrutable," "risible," "obstreperous," or "bogus"; and that such determination should be reversed on the non-parties' appeal. That Supreme Court's prior decisions had been affirmed on appeal did not render defendants' repetition of the arguments insupportable: our pronouncements with respect to the Attorney General's authority to pursue the action and the availability of disgorgement as a remedy were statements of general law appropriate for a CPLR 3211 dismissal analysis where the sole question was the complaint's statement of a cognizable cause of action.

(3) Friedman: The convictions should be reversed.

This action essentially turns section 63(12) on its head. The leniency with which the courts have construed the requirements for pleading and proving fraud under section 63(12)—a leniency that has been extended for the purpose of facilitating the use of the provision to prevent the exploitation of unsophisticated consumers, investors and small businesses—is here being used by Attorney General Letitia James to apply section 63(12) to a scenario to which that provision has never before been applied, or even thought to apply. Specifically, the Attorney General in this case has utilized the flexibility afforded her under section 63(12) to unwind complex financial transactions that were negotiated, face-to-face and at arm's length, between a privately held real estate organization—that of defendant Donald J. Trump, the former president and current president—and ultra-sophisticated banks, insurance companies and government entities, which were advised by equally sophisticated lawyers, accountants, and other business professionals.

The Attorney General complains, and Supreme Court found, that the statements of financial condition (SFCs) that President Trump provided to the counterparties in connection with the transactions at issue overvalued certain of his assets. However, each of the SFCs included written disclaimers advising, in no uncertain terms, that President Trump's valuations of his various properties were estimates that had not been audited and were not beyond dispute. Each counterparty was further warned that it should do its own due diligence and draw its own conclusions about President Trump's net worth, which each counterparty actually did, as it was obligated to do for its own protection as a matter of New York law. Moreover, President Trump paid all the principal, interest, and premiums he owed, and no counterparty ever registered any complaint about the deals before the Attorney General began publicly accusing President Trump of issuing fraudulent SFCs. Had any counterparty been dissatisfied with its transaction, it would have had the incentive and resources to seek redress for violation of its rights through private litigation—litigation that, according to the Attorney General, would have yielded scores of millions of dollars of damages in some cases. No such lawsuit was ever filed.

On this appeal from the nearly half-billion dollar judgment against President Trump and his codefendants, two of my colleagues have cited scores of cases in an attempt to shoehorn this case into section 63(12). They have gone so far as to claim that the Attorney General, by bringing this action, has possibly saved the world from a replay of the financial meltdown of 2008; how this might be is not explained. Despite their efforts, they are unable to point to a single precedent—not even one—for the use of section 63(12) to target transactions such as those at issue here—bilateral, negotiated, arm's-length transactions between highly sophisticated parties, which had no effect on any public market, and which were, so far as the parties to the transactions were concerned, complete successes. Given the absence of any public interest in unwinding these deals, I would not stretch the scope of section 63(12) to reach them.

Moreover, even if bringing this action were within the scope of the Attorney General's power under section 63(12), Supreme Court erred both in granting her summary judgment as to liability on her first cause of action and in rendering a decision in her favor on all causes of action after trial. As explained below, the Attorney General simply failed to prove her case. Accordingly, I would reverse the judgment and dismiss the complaint. Thus, while I concur in the decretal's vacatur of the constitutionally unsound (and otherwise defective) half-billion dollar disgorgement award, I respectfully dissent insofar as the decretal affirms the judgment as to liability and as to the award of nonmonetary relief to the Attorney General.

I note that, of the four justices voting for the decretal, two — Justice Higgitt and Justice Rosado — do not actually agree with the resolution of the appeal for which they are voting. As stated in Justice Higgitt's opinion, he and Justice Rosado believe that the grant of summary judgment to the Attorney General (as to liability on the first cause of action) should be reversed, the judgment vacated, and the matter remanded for a new trial on all causes of action. I commend Justices Higgitt and Rosado for their selflessness in putting aside their personal views to allow this Court to dispose of this appeal. However, I find it remarkable that, although a three-justice majority of this five-justice panel believe that the judgment in favor of the Attorney General should not stand, as she has not carried her burden of proving a violation of the statute, the result of the appeal is the affirmance of the judgment, albeit as modified to eliminate the disgorgement award. To draw a sports analogy, it is as if a team is awarded a touchdown without crossing the goal line. In any event, it seems to me that the result I would reach is more consistent with the outlook of Justices Higgitt and Rosado than the affirmance of the judgment, as modified, for which they are voting.

This leads me to explain why, given that I am alone on this panel in my view that the complaint should be dismissed, I am not voting for the result favored by Justices Higgitt and Rosado — namely, vacatur of the judgment and remand for a new trial. First, I do not believe that we can ignore the fact that ordering a new trial of a case in which the primary defendant and witness is the sitting president of the United States (and will remain so for approximately another 3½ years) would disrupt the political life of the United States and would undermine its national interest, particularly at a time of high global tension, with ongoing conflicts in Europe and the Middle East. Second, while it is obvious from the divergence of opinions among the justices of this panel that this case calls out for further appellate review, an order by this Court directing a retrial is not immediately appealable to the Court of Appeals unless the appellant stipulates to be bound by the prior judgment in the event his further appeal is unsuccessful. It seems inconceivable that defendants would stipulate to a judgment carrying a half-billion dollar award against them. Finally, even if Justice Higgitt is correct that neither side should have been granted summary judgment on their dueling pretrial motions, I agree with Justice Moulton that the record before us—more than 100 volumes, comprising nearly 50,000 pages—is more than sufficient to decide the case without holding another trial. In that regard, I agree with defendants, and respectfully disagree with my colleagues, on the standard of proof applicable to the Attorney General's claims. In my view, the Attorney General should be required to prove her claims under section 63(12) by clear and convincing evidence, not by a mere preponderance of the evidence.

I turn first to the question of whether defendants' present argument is precluded by this Court's decision on the earlier appeal. At that juncture, in rejecting defendants' attempt to have the action dismissed at the pleading stage based on the absence of a state interest, we wrote: "The Attorney General is not suing on behalf of a private individual, but is vindicating the state's sovereign interest in enforcing its legal code—including its civil legal code—within its jurisdiction". It must be borne in mind that this statement was made in reviewing the disposition of a pre-answer motion to dismiss, made at the outset of the action, before the development of a full record. The Court's decision does not state that the Attorney General could ultimately prevail in this action without establishing some sort of state interest, differentiated from the interests of the sophisticated institutional "victims" of defendants' alleged misconduct, of the kind that has historically been recognized as conferring parens patriae standing "to commence an action to protect a public interest". Accordingly, in my view, the doctrine of law of the case does not preclude us from considering defendants' standing argument on the merits.[FN11]

[FN11]As I shall discuss subsequently, even if the law of the case doctrine would otherwise apply, I believe that the unique circumstances presented—and, in particular, the constitutional concerns raised by the Attorney General unprecedented use of the statute in this case—justify departing from the doctrine in this instance. In either case, I do not, as Justice Moulton asserts, "ignore[]" this Court's prior consideration of this issue in Trump I.

Neither Justice Moulton nor Justice Higgitt cites any precedent holding that privately actionable conduct—standing alone, and without proof of any grounds for a belief that the public good would be jeopardized if enforcement of the relevant rules were left to private litigation by the parties concerned—suffices to support a judgment in favor of the Attorney General under section 63(12). Indeed, Justice Higgitt candidly admits that in this case, "we are confronted with an unprecedented use of the statutory power" conferred by section 63(12).

Justice Higgitt is correct in stating that the manner in which section 63(12) is being used in this action is unprecedented. Earlier uses of section 63(12) all involved a specifically public interest, apart from any injury to sophisticated commercial parties fully able to monitor their own interests and to seek redress through private litigation for any violations of their rights. For example, such actions often target deceptive or otherwise unlawful commercial conduct directed toward the general public, most of whom are unsophisticated and whose individual losses may not be large enough to justify private litigation. Section 63(12) has also been used to attack deceptive conduct that influences the price of a publicly traded security, which is bought and sold anonymously on exchanges where traders rely on the issuer's public disclosures and do not conduct independent due diligence. But neither the Attorney General nor either of my colleagues has identified any prior case in which section 63(12) was used, as it is being used here, simply to assert a claim that a sophisticated commercial party was duped, in a face-to-face, arm's-length transaction, into accepting a lower interest rate, or a lower insurance premium, than it would have accepted absent the alleged deception.

In adopting the Attorney General's reading of the statute, my colleagues are empowering her office to attack, at will, virtually any business transaction, regardless of its success or failure, and in the absence of any discernable effect on the public. This is because—as a moment's reflection will disclose—a substantial business deal that goes awry (which none of the transactions at issue did) typically will give rise to a claim by the losing party that, in hindsight, the transaction was induced by some misrepresentation made by the counterparty. This is not surprising, since it is easy for inaccuracies to creep into the description of large business enterprises and certain kinds of representations — such as estimates of value, the kind of representation chiefly at issue here—are inherently subjective and disputable. Indeed, every day on which appeals are argued before this Court, at least one of the appeals (and frequently more than one) involves allegations of fraud in business transactions between sophisticated persons or entities—allegations frequently more serious than those made by the Attorney General in this case. By the reasoning of my colleagues, the Attorney General has the power to involve her office in any one of these disputes and to bring her own suit under section 63(12) against any defendant accused of "repeated" fraud, even if the counterparty's suit falls short under the more exacting rules applicable to common-law fraud claims. By holding that section 63(12) authorizes the Attorney General to pore over the records of private transactions, even successful deals, years after they closed, in the hope of finding at least two inaccurate or disputable statements on which to predicate a lawsuit, without any need to identify a greater public interest at stake, my colleagues invite arbitrary, unpredictable, and inevitably selective use of the judicial system for political ends, and not to "vindicate[] [any] public purpose".

And regrettably, the record makes plain that in this matter, we see an attempt to use section 63(12) and the judicial system for political ends. The proof of this is found not in anything written by me but in the words of the Attorney General herself. Specifically, as previously noted, the Attorney General, in her 2018 election campaign for her current office, repeatedly promised the voters that her top priority, upon being sworn in, would be to bring down President Trump and his real estate empire. The Attorney General made these statements long before February 27, 2019, the date of the supposed trigger for her investigation of President Trump and the other defendants—namely, the testimony before the House of Representatives Committee on Oversight and Reform (the House Oversight Committee) of Michael Cohen, the convicted perjurer and disbarred attorney, in which he claimed that the SFCs of President Trump, his former client, contained inflated valuations of his assets.

As previously noted, the test for fraud under section 63(12) is whether the targeted act "has the capacity or tendency to deceive, or creates an atmosphere conducive to fraud". In adjudicating this case, Supreme Court quoted this standard but disregarded it. In the order disposing of the summary judgment motions, the court held that the Attorney General was required only to prove that the SFCs were "false and misleading," and that the defendants had "repeatedly or persistently used the [SFCs] to transact business" to sustain the standalone Executive Law § 63(12) claim—nothing more. Likewise, in its decision after trial, the court held that plaintiff need only prove that "defendants used false statements in business." Thus, under Supreme Court's view, falsity was all that is required to be shown. In effect, the court adopted a strict liability standard for business representations. This was error.

Contrary to Justice Moulton's mischaracterization of my position, I am not arguing that the determination of whether a defendant has violated section 63(12) should be "tie[d] . . . to whether a counterparty exercised due diligence or justifiably relied on the [allegedly] fraudulent conduct." I agree that whether the particular counterparty in fact conducted due diligence, or in fact justifiably relief on the subject representation, is not a necessary element of the Attorney General's case under the statute. However, to reiterate, whether a defendant's representations to professionals in a given industry had a "capacity or tendency to deceive" or created "an atmosphere conducive to fraud" cannot be determined in a vacuum, without considering the generally accepted conventions and usages of that industry. If the universal practice in the relevant industry is not to take representations such as the SFCs at face value, to hold that the SFCs nonetheless had a "capacity or tendency to deceive" is to fashion an artificial construct of fraud — to treat the sophisticated, professional recipients of the SFCs as if they were naÏve consumers or small investors. Nothing in section 63(12) or the case law thereunder requires us to ignore reality in this fashion.

Turning first to the nature of the asset valuations, Supreme Court apparently took the view that valuations are "objectively" either right or wrong. However, expert testimony in the record establishes that, for a unique asset for which a current market value cannot be obtained with certainty, an appraiser has a choice of different methodologies by which to value the asset, and these different methodologies may yield significantly different valuation figures. As defendants' accounting expert Dr. Eli Bartov testified, a valuation is "an opinion on price derived from a valuation model" and, as an opinion, "can never be objective." Valuations of an asset are "subject to substantial variation," depending on the definitions, assumptions, and methodologies chosen by those preparing the valuation. Thus, the valuation process is inherently subjective, and the Attorney General's disagreement with the valuations of certain assets set forth in the SFCs, and with the supporting opinions of defendants' experts, did not establish "fraud" within the meaning of section 63(12).

In my view, the Attorney General failed to prove her case under any of the Penal Law causes of action for the same reason she failed to prove her case on the stand-alone section 63(12) cause of action — the valuations in the SFCs, as plainly labeled subjective estimates of value of unique assets, simply were not false, even if disputable, in the professional context in which they were used. That being the case, I really need not say more about the Penal Law causes of action. However, some comment is warranted on the dubious evidence on which the Attorney General relied to establish the intent element of these causes of action.

To prove intent in support of the Penal Law causes of action against President Trump, the Attorney General relied almost entirely on the testimony of Michael Cohen, the disbarred lawyer who pleaded guilty to (among other offenses) willful tax evasion, making false statements to a financial institution, and perjury. As summarized by Justice Moulton, Cohen testified that he and defendant Allen Weisselberg were, on occasion, "direct[ed]" by President Trump to "reverse engineer" the valuations in the SFCs to reach a "desired goal." To this end, Cohen testified, he would search for comparable properties on the Internet and base valuations of President Trump's assets on the results of his search so as to reach the predetermined goal. For several reasons—perhaps the same reasons that the Attorney General has, as previously noted, avoided referring to Cohen by name in her appellate brief, and has limited her citation of his testimony to the absolute minimum—Supreme Court's crediting of this testimony does not, in my view, warrant the deference that Justice Moulton extends to it.

Initially, as Justice Moulton acknowledges, Cohen's credibility is undeniably undermined by the crimes to which he pleaded guilty in federal court, which included willful income tax evasion (over a period of five years), making a false statement on a personal credit application to a financial institution, perjurious testimony before a congressional committee, and making an illegal political campaign contribution. A harsh but illuminating light is cast on Cohen's character by the Government's sentencing memorandum, dated December 17, 2018, that was submitted in his case to the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York. Cohen's unreliability as a witness is further demonstrated by his testimony in this case specifically disavowing his guilty pleas to the tax evasion and false statement charges. Cohen went so far as to testify, under oath, that he had been lying to the federal court when he pleaded guilty to those offenses.

Since my view is that the complaint should be dismissed in its entirety, both for the Attorney General's lack of standing and for the failure of her proof, and given that I am in dissent, I need not reach the issue of the statute of limitations. Nonetheless, I note that I agree with Justice Higgitt on this issue to the extent he holds that, with regard to defendants bound by the relevant tolling agreement, the Attorney General's claims are time-barred to the extent they are based on the issuance of SFCs pursuant to transactions that closed before July 13, 2014. This is the necessary implication of our holding in the previous decision that "claims are time barred if they accrued—that is, the transactions were completed—before [the applicable cut-off date]".

(Rather hilariously, when I originally clicked on this HTML opinion, it contained several element-nesting errors (unclosed <b> and <i> elements), and even some mojibake at the top. But it looks like those problems were fixed between then and when I finished writing this comment.)

Articles: AP, Reuters

This is not a very substantive comment, but you are most lawyer-brained non-lawyer I know. It's impressive (and I mean this as a compliment), I had a career counselor once suggest I take my wordcel self down that path, and I'd have probably gone insane.

I don't think that merely summarizing court opinions is an appropriate basis for being considered "lawyer-brained".

My brother in $deity, you do this every week, and also in the Fun Thread. I look forward to those posts, but I think it makes a powerful statement.

Calling a random civil engineer who reads court opinions for fun and summarizes them for karma "lawyer-brained" is an insult to the multiple actual lawyer denizens of this forum.

According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics:

Lawyers typically do the following:

  • Advise and represent clients in criminal or civil proceedings and in other legal matters

  • Communicate with clients, colleagues, judges, and others involved in a case

  • Conduct research and analysis of legal issues

  • Interpret laws, rulings, and regulations for individuals and businesses

  • Present facts and findings relevant to a case on behalf of their clients

  • Prepare and file legal documents, such as lawsuits, contracts, and wills

Lawyers, also called attorneys, research the intent of laws and judicial decisions and determine whether they apply to the specific circumstances of their client’s case. They act as both advocates and advisors for one party in a criminal (offense against the state or the nation) or civil (matters between individuals or organizations) proceeding.

An actual lawyer-brained person would argue with other users about complicated issues, would complain to the moderators regarding poorly worded rules, and would present his learned legal interpretations of various cases. I do none of those things.

Calling a random civil engineer who reads court opinions for fun and summarizes them for karma "lawyer-brained" is an insult to the multiple actual lawyer denizens of this forum.

If anything, it's a compliment to the actual lawyer denizens here. Or at least compared to the many other insults I've heard.

Hi, one of the 'actual lawyer' denizens speaking, you're doing great, please keep that up.

Being able to summarize legalese in human-readable terms is probably the most immediately useful part of being a lawyer.

Arguing over the definition of "lawyer-brained" is about the most lawyer-brained thing there is. I legitimately can't tell if you're trying to satirize yourself here. Either way, I love it.

I dunno, feels pretty fair as an opinion. The book-cookers get blocked from business, Trump gets a shorter-term injunction for orchestrating it, but because no real harm was done, the penalties are struck down as deranged and vindictive. I don’t see a better way of threading the needle between condoning fraud if you’re important enough and deciding on damages based on how much our feelings are hurt.

Enlighten my ignorance. I'm going by headlines I see online, so is it that the court decided the damages awarded against Trump were too high so they were struck down, but the charges can stand?

And what does this mean for the NY AG Letitia James? Is she okay on the grounds that the charges were legit to bring against him, or is this going to damage her?

My guess is that under the hood this was a political grenade and everyone deemed this the easiest way to defuse it without causing other problems. The reality of the law was likely subordinate to getting out as clean as possible.

So we get this - and move on.

The trial judge convicted Trump of fraud, and on that basis imposed on Trump two separate punishments—disgorgement of several hundred megadollars, and disqualification from serving as an officer or director of any New York business for several years. Disgorgement is, not really punitive, but compensatory, meant to undo any damages that were done. The appeals panel ruled that the prosecutor failed to prove the quantity of damages caused by Trump's fraud, so the disgorgement had no basis. But the punitive disqualification still stands.

I have no opinion on what effect this will have on the prosecutor's reputation.

True but a majority of the court would’ve voted to vacate or overturn the entire conviction. But they couldn’t agree on vacate v overturn.

…this can’t have been any easier than including a paragraph or two of your own commentary.

I will rule that it does clear the bar, but dang, I’d have preferred page numbers instead of block quotes.

This can’t have been any easier than including a paragraph or two of your own commentary.

I don't have any opinion on which judges are correct.

I’d have preferred page numbers instead of block quotes.

Preliminary "slip" opinions from New York's appeals panels are published in HTML without page numbers, not in PDF with page numbers. I have seen people refer to a 320-page PDF, but it's not official.

(Weirdly, New York's trial courts publish slip opinions in a mixture of HTML and PDF.)

I suppose you’d know better than I.

Reducing the financial penalty (and the sanctions that looked like they were aimed to discourage preserving an argument for review) helps a lot of the most egregious abuses, here, but it's still an absolute mess of the case and an opinion, here. Friedman's "However, I find it remarkable that, although a three-justice majority of this five-justice panel believe that the judgment in favor of the Attorney General should not stand, as she has not carried her burden of proving a violation of the statute, the result of the appeal is the affirmance of the judgment..." isn't inexplicable, but it's hard to read as anything but a strong bet by two judges that the state supreme court is willing to do their dirty work for them.

Is it because she didn’t carry the burden, or is it because the “divided court” somehow ruins a retrial? I don’t understand why that isn’t an option.

I think only Friedman found a case-wide failure to carry the burden of proof; the rest of the judges mostly focus on the burden of proof for disgorgement aka the high fines.

In New York, as in most other jurisdictions, appeals courts can only overturn an action from a lower court with a full majority of the appeals court judges. Here, there's a majority (5/5) on the fines and sanctions, and division on everything else, and it's not even clear that Higgitt and Rosado want a retrial here so much as think it would be appropriate in a non-Trump case.

Beyond that, there's also just a lot of issues with this specific case getting a retrial -- Higgitt/Rosado might have settled for a dissental because they couldn't get a third signing onto a retrial, but they might have not really wanted a retrial in this case and only argued it for others in the future. Everyone else gives a different reason why they don't want a retrial. From the Moulton/Renwick:

Returning this action to Supreme Court for a new trial as urged by Justice Higgitt is both unnecessary and likely terminal. It is difficult to imagine that a trial could proceed while one of the principal defendants, and a central witness, is President of the United States. The inevitable elapse of time and the attendant difficulties in recreating a vast record of testimony and documents — an exercise that is both Sisyphean and unneeded, because an extensive trial record already exists — would likely consign this meritorious case to oblivion.

From Friedman:

First, I do not believe that we can ignore the fact that ordering a new trial of a case in which the primary defendant and witness is the sitting president of the United States (and will remain so for approximately another 3½ years) would disrupt the political life of the United States and would undermine its national interest, particularly at a time of high global tension, with ongoing conflicts in Europe and the Middle East.[FN3] Second, while it is obvious from the divergence of opinions among the justices of this panel that this case calls out for further appellate review, an order by this Court directing a retrial is not immediately appealable to the Court of Appeals unless the appellant stipulates to be bound by the prior judgment in the event his further appeal is unsuccessful (CPLR 5601[c], 5602[b][1]; see Trezza v Metropolitan Transp. Auth., 23 NY3d 1011, 1011 [2014]; Maynard v Greenberg, 82 NY2d 913, 914-915 [1994]). It seems inconceivable that defendants would stipulate to a judgment carrying a half-billion dollar award against them.[FN4] Finally, even if Justice Higgitt is correct that neither side should have been granted summary judgment on their dueling pretrial motions, I agree with Justice Moulton that the record before us — more than 100 volumes, comprising nearly 50,000 pages — is more than sufficient to decide the case without holding another trial.

I've been chewing on an idea and wanted to try a steel-manning exercise.

The premise is this: If we grant that the cultural right is "winning" right now, what's the strongest possible argument that this is leading to some genuinely bad outcomes for the country?

I have a few specific angles in mind. How would you build the strongest case for these ideas?

  1. A more "gloves-off" approach to online speech is a win for free expression, but its most visible result has been the normalization of unapologetic racism. The core of this argument isn't just that it's unpleasant, but that it's actively corroding social trust and making it harder to have a unified country. Not sure if you’ve seen this too, but I see tons of ‘black fatigue’ and explicitly white nationalist people in my feed and there’s not much I or anybody else can do about it. What does the most persuasive version of this argument look like?

  2. It seems pretty clear that rhetoric from the top, especially from Trump, has pushed nativist ideas into the open. The strong version of this argument is that this has moved beyond simple policy disagreements (like border security) and has become a real cultural attitude of exclusion. How would you build the case that this isn't just a fringe phenomenon anymore, but a significant and growing force in American life?

  3. This flows from the last point. For decades, our biggest strategic advantage has been that the smartest, most ambitious people from all over the world wanted to come here. The argument to be steel-manned is that we're actively squandering that. Between the nativist vibe and a chaotic immigration system, we're sending a signal that the best and brightest should maybe look elsewhere. What's the most solid case that we're causing a real "brain drain" that will kneecap us economically and technologically for years to come?

What makes me think about this point is all of the talk about Indian people online. Like them or not, they are STRONG contributors in the workplace. If the rhetoric gets to a point where legal immigrants and contributors to our society feel unwelcome, there could be real brain drain effects that we’ve never experienced before. The Vivek backlash a few months ago also is probably related.

Again, knowing that ideas like these are losing right now, how you would argue them to the best of your ability? I’ll admit I kind of want to hear them outside a setting like X where communities are isolated and you’re mostly preaching to the choir / your ingroup

A more "gloves-off" approach to online speech is a win for free expression, but its most visible result has been the normalization of unapologetic racism.

For me, as much as I've been infuriated with progressive activism the past decade, the censorship rollback has revealed that the leftists were, in fact, right about many of the rightoids. Many actually are racist -- not in the "oh, there may be group differences" sense, but in the "I hate colored people and I want them out of the country" sense.

Why we can't have a single group that has stable, high-IQ people in charge advocating for basic civic decency, responsibility, and functional society is beyond me. Yes, we can and should imprison colored people for committing violent crime. No, this is not racist. No, that does not mean we ship all the colored people away at gunpoint. As Bukele has so clearly demonstrated, even in a country quite literally full of brown people with a globally chart-topping murder rate, all you have to do is put the violent criminals in prison and the crime magically drops to levels of western Europe. It is, in fact, that simple.

Alas, this is all clearly too much to ask of the Americans.

Why we can't have a single group that has stable, high-IQ people in charge advocating for basic civic decency, responsibility, and functional society is beyond me

We really tried. Politicians were supposed to be that (that's the whole point of having representative republic instead of direct democracy). They are obviously nothing of the sort. Journalists were supposed to be that. They sold their mission for clicks and ideological peer adoration. Academia was supposed to be that. They sold their mission for grants and ideological power. We don't have it because - collectively, as a society - we tried it and we fucked it up. We don't have currently any institution that is interested in doing that.

That said, anti-immigrant sentiment is nothing new. It has been about the Irish, about the Germans, about the Chinese, about the Japanese (US people literally put them in camps!) and so on, and so forth. Cross-cultural encounters will always produce people that reject the other culture and hate everything and everybody that has to do with it. It can be worked through - provided that there's a working integration process. Multiculturalism broke that process though because it's ideological premise has been that integration is evil, demanding newcomers to adapt to the host culture is evil, the host culture is by default oppressive and guilty, and must go out of its way - including throwing out the rules that apply to the members of the host culture and hold it together - lest the newcomers feel inconvenienced or sad. The result has been a predictable disaster everywhere it has been tried. If the right wants to recover from this disaster, they need to formulate a coherent integration policy, and build a clear ideological wall of separation between anti-immigrant sentiment (which will not go anywhere, it is an inevitable consequence of culture heterogeneity) and enforcing integration policy. Which may piss off some loudmouths but there's no other way if there is to be an ideologically sound platform that does not cut ties with the centuries of American tradition.

With violent crime it really is the same very small number of people doing it(yes, I’ve seen whatever Twitter thread you want to reference trying to prove mathematically that 13/52 means some notable percentage of the black male population will commit murder over the course of their lives- it’s all bupkiss because they don’t account for repeat offenders). With school performance and demands for a bailout because of it it is not.

For me, as much as I've been infuriated with progressive activism the past decade, the censorship rollback has revealed that the leftists were, in fact, right about many of the rightoids.

They've always been right that some people are racist. The steelmanned counter-argument is just that the cure is worse than the disease . Progressives themselves agree that pure racial animus alone is not that important, which is why they define it away via "racism= prejudice + power" . Progressives can't be trusted not because racism doesn't exist, but because it's a blank cheque for a bunch of very stupid and/or illiberal policies.

I think the logic largely goes like this:

  1. The solution is just to jail the blacks who are committing all the crime and loudly say its a bad thing and then do nothing to the non-criminals
  2. The left has made clear that is not an option, as long as the levels are disproportionate doing anything about the problem members is not allowed, and loudly decrying them is absolutely verboten.
  3. Fine then, if the existence of a black population implies a large level of criminality and disfunction which we are not allowed to address then the problem is the existence of the population.

Its the same way that most people are not immigration absolutists but if the left and center refuse to deal with them problem and indeed insist on making it worse then I guess I'll vote for the right, even though they will go much further than I'd prefer. Or if the right insists on full abortion bans then I'll vote for the left and their up to the moment of birth plans, even though I'd prefer reasonable limits.

If the left was open to fixing the actual problem then throwing the baby out with the bathwater would be less popular. Though the fact that in this case the non-problem population is also very loudly offended by the idea of solving the problem makes it worse.

I see tons of ‘black fatigue’ and explicitly white nationalist people in my feed

Your feed is your own problem. Both the comments about black fatigue and the white supremacist remarks are mostly bots designed to grab your attention, and even the ones that are real are chosen by bot to grab your attention. Make better choices.

I don't think that's possible at scale. You could get smarter, more self-aware people to do this, but most people aren't either one of these things. In fact, I think bots designed to grab your attention implicitly makes this point. The bots will grab the people's attention, so "Make better choices" isn't really feasible for the population.

The Left's attempt at trying to "end" racism by shifting blame onto the history of white people while also censoring their opinions made things worse, so I'm not advocating for going back to that, but the algorithm and its recognition of our tendency to gravitate toward controversy should maybe figure out better ways to redirect the energy people have for hating others.

Perhaps racism evolved because it is useful? I’m not suggesting there are t terrible failure modes but if multiculturalism actually is bad, then maybe some soft racism is actually good?

At risk of reductio ad fascism, there are quite a number of things which are useful but not good. We should not do those things.

I too am terrified that if we deport more Guatemalans not enough Indians will come here and do the jobs Americans just won't do (for less than minimum wage).

There's one major factory company left in mid-Michigan, but they hire their engineering and technical staff entirely from the subcontinent. Now, because I've seen the unemployment numbers and because this used to be a manufacturing hub, I don't think this is because there aren't enough locals to do the job. It just costs more when you can't ship them back after their visa is up. Every hotel in fifty miles smells like curry, but at least Dow doesn't hire Americans for jobs outside the warehouse.

It would be a real tragedy if those indians were so enraged by anti-black racism they see on the internet that they no longer wanted to come here. Why, companies might have to pay real wages and benefits, and not be able to hold a work visa over their recruits' heads, and that would be bad. Our economy cannot survive without a constant stream of immigrants, because we have laws that force employers to meet certain minimum criteria when hiring Americans, and that's bad.

It’s entirely plausible that the talent these people actually need isn’t available in the US due to the skilled labor shortage. Particularly the U.S. no longer bothers to produce skilled factory labor.

Yes, the problem is the US has no engineering schools. You must have gone to school here.

Skilled manufacturing labor, specifically, is something the US does not produce much of. We probably don't need unlimited H1B's for software engineering but there aren't enough millwrights, CNC machine operators and technicians, calibration techs, etc. These are good jobs because they require a high degree of skill and they are actually necessary for running factories. My heart goes out for qualified Americans being passed over in favor of Indian and Chinese skilled workers- an easy task, because they are imaginary. We are at full employment for these people. We are at full employment for Americans able and willing to train for these jobs, too. Yes, there's plenty of fat potheads who would totally be interested in journeyman's wages for these positions but they have no experience and can't pass a drugtest- to the extent they'll put the joint down and accept the training pay for these jobs, they get hired to train.

The skilled blue collar labor shortage is an actual problem and 'but America has universities' is not a retort. The only people interested in solving this are unions with their own interests- an imperfect interest group, to say the least.

Did I say skilled manufacturing labor? Or was that what you had an argument ready for, and you figured my post was as good a place as any?

You said ‘engineering and technical staff’. These people are technical staff and lots of them have ‘engineer’ in their job title.

This just looks like you are deliberately misinterpreting OP's point. Surely some random "factory company" in mid-Michigan is not where the "smartest, most ambitious people from all over the world" congregate to give America a strategic advantage. Instead, if we are talking about Indians, it's going to be the likes of Google, Microsoft and SpaceX. The Gemini whitepaper, for example, has plenty of Indian names on it.

The problems prospective workers at those companies (or people who may or may not enter as students, and then later would naturally go on to work there) face are not "anti-black racism on the internet" either, but onerous checks and arbitrary rejections in the visa process and at border controls and the perceived increased probability that you will be deported over a random tweet. Now, a red-blooded red triber will for sure be cheering if some Indian Googler who retweeted an "America is helping Israel establish neocolonial apartheid" tweet gets unceremoniously deported, but it is unlikely that any damage to American interests from that retweet is greater than his contributions to American tech dominance, and other potential Indian Googlers who would never even have retweeted such a thing will only see "our countryman was deported for capricious reasons".

Now, a red-blooded red triber will for sure be cheering if some Indian Googler who retweeted an "America is helping Israel establish neocolonial apartheid" tweet gets unceremoniously deported,

This is a weird scenario partially because Indians themselves (well, some) likely have at least interesting views on the situation between the Indian minority in South Africa during actual Apartheid (not entirely from within the borders of modern India), and modern day India's relations with Israel largely vis-a-vis it's relations with its Muslim neighbor Pakistan.

History and society is complicated.

It seems pretty clear that rhetoric from the top, especially from Trump, has pushed nativist ideas into the open. The strong version of this argument is that this has moved beyond simple policy disagreements (like border security) and has become a real cultural attitude of exclusion. How would you build the case that this isn't just a fringe phenomenon anymore, but a significant and growing force in American life?

I don't take those immigration arguments seriously. America is and will remain an attractive destination because America is doing better than most of the world, same as always. Americans are still, factually, incredibly immigrant-friendly by most standards. Hell, I think Trump may end up suffering because of the one thing he undoubtedly did well, closing the border, reduces the salience of the matter and normies become much less willing to tolerate his other immigration shenanigans.

Complaints by downwardly mobile people online won't change that an Indian American woman is married to the VP right now and is closer to power than any online dissident rightist or person bitter about being driven out of a Google job

The argument I would make is that the left is better at this, according to the Right's own theory of the case. They took over the institutions more effectively, to the point where the attempted populist reclamation (which came pretty late) looks hamfisted and illegitimate in comparison. They possess the bulk of the human capital and their ideology is just baked into the culture now. So there'll be huge payback when they inevitably get into power with the support of a radicalized normie base. If you think this leads to awful decisions and a never-ending polarization spiral, it's pretty bad for everyone, not just Republicans.

The premise is this: If we grant that the cultural right is "winning" right now, what's the strongest possible argument that this is leading to some genuinely bad outcomes for the country?

I think your premise is dubious, but assuming it's true, mostly what I see is a victory for accelerationists.

Everything Trump is doing now means when Democrats come back into power, they are going to try to reverse everything he did and then set the dial at eleventy and make sure no MAGA ever again. The MAGAs currently in power, of course, know this is what will happen, so they're doing their best to make their changes difficult or impossible to reverse, while hitting eleventy themselves.

I think Trump and Desantis and Abbot have demonstrated that the accelerationists were already in charge on immigration. There really was basically no control of the border and no attempt to remove obvious criminals once they got here. That's why Trump was able to get at all that low-hanging fruit, and why there haven't been really compelling immigration atrocity stories. The best they could do was Abrego Garcia... and he certainly seems like a bad hombre, even if his case was screwed up procedurally.

Immigration is one of the issues where I tend to be more in agreement than not with the "anti" side.

Which is why I think your fist-pumping for "fuck yeah faster harder" accelerationism is ill-considered.

Because if you think future Democratic administrations cannot open the borders more than previous ones did, I think you're in for a world of disappointment. And that is frankly what I expect to happen.

Skipping the NGO middlemen of bus passes and providing guidance by running direct flights instead, or what?

Skipping the NGO middlemen of bus passes and providing guidance by running direct flights instead, or what?

No, they were already doing that also. The AP confirms this in the process of denying it.

Ha, I was thinking of the recent brouhaha in the UK with the Afghans, this one had already slipped my mind. Thank you for the reminder.

I should hate the tiger that is trying to eat me

…Wait, what? Why? Feeling hatred for a non-sapient animal seems bizarre to me. Never mind whether it's ever good to feel hatred even about fellow human beings - I find your example baffling on its own terms. You may as well hate a thunderstorm when it threatens your town, or rage against the concept of gravity as you're falling off a bridge. Like… you can hate any one of those things if you really want, I guess. By definition it's not like they're going to mind. But it seems deeply pointless, bordering on maladaptive. I certainly don't see why you "should" hate the tiger, whether that's a moral argument of a practical one. If it's a moral one, what has the tiger done to 'deserve' hatred that the concept of gravity has not? If it's a practical one, what does hating the tiger accomplish that is not better accomplished, and in less stressful a way for you, by dispassionately, rationally accounting for the tiger's behavior, or indeed, by simply being afraid of the tiger?

The tiger, like a political opponent and unlike gravity, is a problem that you can at least theoretically end. And once you've made that decision to seek it's end, it is an adaptive simplification to just psychologically refer back to that seeking of ends as a terminal value.

Thus, it makes perfect sense to hate the tiger.

psychologically refer back to that seeking of ends as a terminal value

I think that's a very lacking definition of "hate". I would associate that word with an obsessive, rage-filled state of mind - which is both unpleasant for whoever feels it, and more likely to cloud one's judgement than to help with the task at hand. You don't need to hate a deer to successfully hunt and kill it; why should the tiger be any different?

The tiger is an active threat. The deer is not. Hate walls off the vile spark that spares the foe. And if you were at risk of starving, I bet you'd muster up the courage to hate that deer - for your family's sake.

If racism is rational, it's not bigoted, and it's not clear why it should be a bad thing.

If sexism is rational, it's not bigoted, and it's not clear why it should be a bad thing.

If the logical consequences of labor meriting little to no wage is rational, it's not bigoted, and it's not clear why it should be a bad thing.

As soon as you start asking "why it's clear it should be a bad thing", it's a direct attack on the social license of the people whose set of characteristics predict they'd be on the low side. This is why the left is the way that it is, in attitude and in membership. Parasitism is a valid evolutionary strategy.

Now, liberalism had an answer for this in the "accept a dead weight loss to the incapable such that the categories stop being easily predictable [in the sense that it becomes more likely a citizen X is being treated as they deserve individually, not citizen X having special/non-special protection for being a hypenated-X]". But that process takes time and is vulnerable to being hijacked by "therefore the standard is evil".

And so at the end of the day, you end up with the choice of being hijacked into accepting unlimited loss so the people on the low side feel better, or saying "yes, chad" to "If X is rational, it's not bigoted and it's not clear why it should be a bad thing". Or not saying it but acting in the same way, as with Jesse Jackson's famous remark about being ashamed at his relief that someone he heard walking behind him turned out to be white.

Well, all organizations that aren't explicitly progress-minded/right-wing eventually gain a parasitic load right at the border between stability and collapse/become left-wing, after all.

Or not saying it but acting in the same way

Which was the '60s-'90s compromise. It's actually kind of interesting that the balance between [what everyone else typifies as] left-wing and right-wing takes on the character of a marriage between the statistically-mean man and the statistically-mean woman.

It seems to me that almost every woman is more cautious around any individual man vs any individual woman (especially in isolated situations) due to the risk of sexual assault. Is this sexist? Should they not discriminate in this manner?

Isolated allowance for pattern recognition. The usual Who? Whom?

A woman more on guard around men than around women is being smart in looking out for herself.

A woman less relaxed around black men than she is around white men is a racist who should be ashamed of herself.

Yes, that would be an example of the phenomenon that I am referring to. I am interested in the justification for this discrepancy in the mind of a progressive or even classical liberal. @ThisIsSin care to weigh in?

Amusingly, I disagree with pretty much all of your premises. But #1 is interesting as a jumping-off point, so I’ll address it.

There’s a broad concept that left-wing sentiment is pro-black and right-wing sentiment is anti-black, and the two forces battle over how nicely to treat blacks. I think this is a misconception. Neither side, from what I can tell, really likes blacks, and both surface their antipathy in different ways which wind up being one and the same larger system.

By blacks, I don’t strictly mean people of African heritage. What I’m pointing to here is a subculture in America that is descended from slavery and which exists substantially outside the main drive of society. It has its own norms, doesn’t intermarry too often, doesn’t economically interact that much, watches its own TV, listens to its own music, and so on. This is what is disliked in its actuality by the political wings, because it’s not really part of either of them. The reality is, of course, more nuanced than this, but this is a good overview.

The left nominally likes blacks, until it comes to the problems that really do exist in black communities. These can be broadly described as symptoms of poverty, or of an underclass. I'm talking crime, of course, but homophobia is a pretty serious repellent here. The left response to these is to pretend they don’t actually exist, or are somehow caused by systemic pressures, which of course is besides the point. The left loves blacks who have integrated thoroughly into their cultural milieu.

The right is simpler. They just don’t like ‘em. There are some good ones, but the rest are bad. Best to stay away as much as you can.

So, neither wanting to get deeply involved, a fairly predictable pattern emerges. First, the left tries to support the “black community,” or at least the image they have of them. This tends to be through charity and lenience towards crime. This generally does not go well, and without seeing any positive outcomes, the general public starts getting sick of crime. Then the right wing sweeps in, declares the problem in racial(-ly coded) language, and cracks down hard. It doesn’t take long to notice that this policy rests on practical elements of prejudice against blacks, and so the general public starts swinging the other way…

So you get this effect, where first the left comes in and says: listen, you don’t need to work, have these handouts, shoplifting isn’t that big a deal, neither are drugs, no we won’t stop the violent gangbangers, we believe in community justice… so black people take that at face value, huh, guess dissipation and petty crime aren’t a big deal, and if anyone disrespects me I’d better deal with it myself. Then the right comes in and says, HA! You idiots believed that? Nope, it’s prison for you. And we know you’re all like that. So now obviously a lot of blacks are in jail, but also the kids start to learn: this is what it means to be black, they all see you that way… and maybe start thinking it’s right.

So I see these two movements as the greater American ambivalence towards blacks. There was a great injustice done to them, and they are suffering from it generations later. This is felt on a wide scale. It makes people uncomfortable. So people aren’t willing to see blacks as other people, and instead hide their individuality under the label. When a white person does something, or feels something, it’s because of who they are, but when a black person does, it’s because of who blacks are. But if you want to change a group’s behavior, you need to change the behavior of the individuals in that group, one by one. There is no other way.

Any serious attempt to deal with the troubles afflicting black Americans, and those they inflict on others, has to start with this view on individuality. “Blacks” are not like you and me, but individual black people can be. Others might not, and they might be criminal, and if so they need to be dealt with, but this is a fact disconnected from the rest. Some might need more explicit inculturation. That will require generations, and the removal of any privileges for being black. The end result of this must be the destruction of a uniquely black culture in America. This is inevitable. If we’re all alike, then there will be nothing left to distinguish that unique culture, except in superficial and vague elements. Anyone know what it means to be Irish besides wearing green on St Paddy’s? Or Italian besides having prejudiced views of different brands of San Marzano tomatoes? Or German besides living in the Midwest? Neither do I. And with intermarriage the distinction breaks down further.

So the current Trump thing is more of the same… except that politics is becoming less racially split. A lot of black men voted T last time. This means they’re not voting as a bloc, that they’re not voting for historic reasons, that there’s something they want past their race. Class is up, comparatively. Maybe that’s the end of black America: in our workers, uniting against the Man. We’ll have to see, I guess.

I’m not sure that ‘the good ones’ and the ‘black activists working to improve their communities’ are meaningfully different concepts. Sûre, one is a polite euphemism, but the red tribe uses a lot fewer of those in general.

As far as politics getting less racially split- well I think that’s probably downstream of social dysfunction. The deal was always ‘blacks vote Democrat, democrats take care of the black community through their machines’, but when the community gets worse young men are going to be the first defectors(and old women thé last)- almost exactly the pattern we see with black Trump supporters. At the end of the day thé black tribe is its own thing, much more ethnic than thé basically-assimilatory red and blue tribes. It’s urban, poor, southern, and honor driven. ‘Blue’ whites might really like black tribe music, and ‘red’ whites might do so much more quietly, but they’re still separate- and both tribes of whites only offer assimilation over the long term. Now this isn’t particularly realistic for blues because there is no place in the blue tribe for 85 IQ types, so the process is a lot slower and less insistent(the red tribe answer would be that there are many eg truck drivers who make a good living while not being good at school, disproportionately black), hence really identitarian blacks are stuck in a coalition agreement with the blues. But college, reparations, and progressive values are the same package as hard work, family values, and Christianity- just with different components.

But college, reparations, and progressive values are the same package as hard work, family values, and Christianity- just with different components.

I’d disagree that these are comparable, in line with your 85 IQ observation. The urban intellectual model of advancement is through education and a high-skill career, which is simply not in the cards for people under 120ish IQ. That’s the equivalent to family values and hard work, respectively, which targets a different demographic. So what can those urban intellectuals offer blacks? In this case, I think it’s race-based action and reparations (welfare etc). The final item is what’s expected of each group once they’ve advanced - for the urbans, it’s progressive values, like you note, and I’d place patriotism (especially local) over Christ for the workers (of course the individual workers have their own priorities - but this appears to me to be what the system, the tribe, wants out of them). And from the blacks, the only thing needed is the vote. This is what consistently pisses me off about the Democratic plans for black Americans. It reduces them to a client class. They get treats, the party gets votes. This is intensely degrading. Shouldn’t they get something to be proud of in themselves, the power of their work, things they acc do beyond asking for more?

So that’s why I don’t think they’re comparable. The rule system that urban elites hold themselves to is different from the rules they require of others.

I’m not sure that ‘the good ones’ and the ‘black activists working to improve their communities’ are meaningfully different concepts. Sûre, one is a polite euphemism, but the red tribe uses a lot fewer of those in general.

I don't think the right wing would consider black activists to be "the good ones". Or at least not the same black activists that the left wing would describe as "black activists working to improve their communities".

But it’s not like they’re different concepts

I think they are. The "black activists" are leaders of generally good people in bad circumstances, who are uplifting the rest of said people. The "good ones" are decent people in an otherwise bad bunch, who may be stuck with them or may have escaped but in either case aren't bettering their hopeless community. Sowell's unconstrained vision versus constrained vision.

Normiecons do not think every Quantavius and Latisha is evil. They think that they are mostly decent people shaped by a bad culture(which was ruined by liberals because they hate families). 'The good ones' are doing their part to fix that- by assimilating into the red tribe and hopefully leading their fellows to do the same.

C'mon, these community activists aren't doing shit to benefit the average Shaniqua and Tyrone either, don't be stupid. The main difference is that the red tribe is just willing to openly point to 'bad culture' as a major part of their bad circumstances whereas blues only hint at it and use euphemisms.

I think they were saying that black activists are to the left as “the good ones” are to the right, not that they are the same group.

I had a comment a while ago about how people outside America looking in are still at the "call a spade a spade" level of meta, and when they do what they say and yell about what they want they're confused about why the dominant American culture doesn't get it. The dominant American culture has been sipping industrial grade postmodern self-aware media propaganda and their mainstream entertainment is constructed out of large irony blocks.

Maybe African-Americans are not deep enough within the levels of simulacra to have internalized not to take either wing of the political aisle at face value yet.

Or German besides living in the Midwest? Neither do I.

The presence of German culture in the US was pretty much forced out of the popular consciousness in two waves in the 1910s and 1940s for obvious reasons. It used to be a common language, even with German-language newspapers. Somehow the folks that get very upset about "destroying subcultures" never notice that example. You can still find bits and pieces around: Oktoberfest and such, and amusingly in elements of polka in Norteño music.

Also shiner bock beer, German influence in barbecue, etc.

It’s still quietly dominant in Texas, the Midwest, and chunks of New England. But none of those are leading cultural centers like California.

Texas BBQ, country music, craft beer are all Having A Moment and all are very German influenced.

So, neither wanting to get deeply involved, a fairly predictable pattern emerges. First, the left tries to support the “black community,” or at least the image they have of them. This tends to be through charity and lenience towards crime. This generally does not go well, and without seeing any positive outcomes, the general public starts getting sick of crime. Then the right wing sweeps in, declares the problem in racial(-ly coded) language, and cracks down hard. It doesn’t take long to notice that this policy rests on practical elements of prejudice against blacks, and so the general public starts swinging the other way…

The language always becomes racially coded because the underlying phenomenon is too. If you have one group that's massively more prone to crime, any attempt to attack criminals will lead to that word being associated with that group - until the problem resolves itself.

How do we know this? Because even left-wingers do not escape. Hillary Clinton was criticized for her own usage of terms like "superpredator" - meant to describe young, "feral" teens committing crime with abandon but it was then taken to be a racial dogwhistle based on who it was applied to. Trump, bizarrely, used it against Biden as well.

A more "gloves-off" approach to online speech is a win for free expression, but its most visible result has been the normalization of unapologetic racism. The core of this argument isn't just that it's unpleasant, but that it's actively corroding social trust and making it harder to have a unified country.

I can't steelman it because it's begging for "remove the beam in your own eye!" or "your rules, applied fairly" and devolving into a chicken and egg argument. Unapologetic racism was already normalized, but only against certain groups. A win for free expression just opened that up to all groups on social media; it's still restricted in any meaningful publication and the consequences are quite different for racism against protected groups versus unprotected.

Apparently "no racism" wasn't an option on the cultural table.

How would you build the case that this isn't just a fringe phenomenon anymore, but a significant and growing force in American life?

Surely the DHS twitter feed does enough to provide that case?

we're sending a signal that the best and brightest should maybe look elsewhere.

The problem with this one is, there's nowhere else to look. Much of Europe is having its own nativist backlash and if you're particularly high-achieving in a technological field, you won't get paid a fraction as much. The H1B changes will mean fewer low-level people coming in that route, but I don't think the announced changes will affect the "best and brightest" that much.

For decades, our biggest strategic advantage has been that the smartest, most ambitious people from all over the world wanted to come here.

There's a relevant essay from Arctotherium on this, you don't have to have mass immigration to bring in the top Taiwanese semiconductor experts, or German nuclear scientists or post-Soviet Russian STEM experts. You can bring in a few hundred or a few thousand people on 10x wages, have them stay for a few years to teach locals the skills and then have them leave or retire into obscurity.

China for instance brought in South Korean shipbuilding experts on high wages, worked out how to build ships and now dominates the world shipping industry. They tried this with semiconductors too, Taiwan actually passed laws to stop Chinese companies poaching semiconductor talent with high pay. Meiji Japan did this too, alongside others he mentions. Targeted skill acquisition does not require mass immigration.

https://substack.com/home/post/p-169701612

The US is very wealthy, they could close the door to the median-wage immigrants and keep the top talent, even aggressively headhunt top talent with high payouts. Not 'I published a crappy paper in one of those journals that exists for resume packing' but 'I'm actually really smart and have these rare skills'.

Furthermore, there are all kinds of problems with relying on mass immigration.

There is indeed a large amount of Indian talent, I see Indian names on various AI papers regularly. So why isn't India rich or at least on par with China? There's no Indian Deepseek, Huawei, BYD, J-20. There may well be something wrong with Indian culture or society that impedes this kind of development. Mass immigration would likely import this problem to some extent.

Suppose there's a disaster in America, it's one of those situations where all hands need to be on deck for a massive crisis. Would the Indians, Chinese, Latin Americans perhaps think 'not my problem' and head back to their home countries rather than giving their utmost? If they leave their country for a better life once, they can do it again if the situation changes.

Whatever issues with unity there are in America, it's hardly going to be helped by mass immigration. More ethnicities and diversity increases the potential for conflict. There are also the more basic costs of unfiltered 'Fuck Trump' mass immigration of randoms who come in via Mexico: drugs, crime, welfare payments, gaming the electoral system, demographic replacement.

Now it's fairly reasonable that some truly elite people will be turned off by the administration's rhetoric, even if the Trump admin did go 'we want the super smart but not the mediocre'. They might not want to come to America because overseas mainstream media blares out FASCIST USA. But it's not clear that this would be that bad compared to mass immigration.

We can see the results: Australia, Canada and the UK have been doing mass immigration. Racism has been suppressed by hate speech laws. The economic results/innovation in these countries have been underwhelming at best. Canadian GDP per capita has stagnated over the last 10 years. Britain is mired in all kinds of problems.

The strongest argument against Trumpism IMO is that it puts these loudmouths in charge, who go around openly declaring their strategies and letting their opponents counter them: https://x.com/Jukanlosreve/status/1958334108989530207

They're simple and unsophisticated thinkers in a complex world.

But even there, you don't have to be loud and obnoxious to be dumb. The EU is full of sober, hard-working, reasonable and civilized leaders who do immense damage to Europe by constantly making terrible decisions.

https://substack.com/home/post/p-169701612

My impression is that almost everyone on the Grok and OpenAI teams are either the children of immigrants or people who came to the US as the children. This seems to be the case for almost all of our very highly successful first and second generation immigrants.

If they leave their country for a better life once, they can do it again if the situation changes.

Lots of these people are second or third generation immigrants by now. They're Americans.

In my opinion, US immigration seems to be broadly work. If Arctotherium had made these predictions 30 years ago, he would have been proven wrong. Sure, we can reduce immigration, but what we do re Chinese and Indian immigrants seems to be working very well.

What predictions does he make that you think are wrong?

Arctotherium says this regarding AI:

For example, much writing on AI accurately points out how reliant the US AI industry is on foreign talent, with around 70% of high-end researchers being foreign born, and then condemn the Trump administration for hostility to immigration. But they typically fail to point out the tiny numbers involved.

We’re talking maybe 10000 people total in the entire world, with annual fluxes into and out of the US, including during the open-borders Biden years, in the hundreds. It is entirely possible to recruit as much of this talent as is willing to move to the United States while cutting skilled immigration by 99%, and we should. OpenAI technical staff and people Mark Zuckerberg is willing to pay a hundred million dollars to recruit are not generic H-1Bs or foreign students, and conflating the two is dishonest.

I remember reading years ago about a survey someone gave to Christians and atheists, asking them what they find to be the most compelling argument for either side. It turned out that the most compelling argument for atheism, as rated by atheists didn't rank all that high for Christians, and the one rated by Christians wasn't all that compelling to atheists, and you saw the same patterns for arguments for Christianity. So what is the steelman argument for atheism? The one rated highest by atheists, since that is presumably what made them lose their faith (as that was in the times when people were Christian-by-default, rather than atheist-by-default), or the one rated highest by Christians, as that is what they consider the most challenging for their faith?

You asked for me to defend these arguments to the best of my ability, and that would indicate that answering in the mode of a Christian giving the best argument for atheism would be ok, but my best argument for the ideas you outlined might contain assumptions that you disagree with so deeply, that you want recognize my defense as defending your ideas anymore. On the other hand, without these assumptions, I won't find these defenses particularly compelling, so how much of a steelman are they then? Still, the best of my ability sounds like I would have to be the one to find them compelling, so this is the perspective I'll be taking, while trying to preserve your core premises as best as I can.

The kinds of arguments that I find the most compelling on these issues are ones that acknowledge that certain things happened that got us to where we are now. Regarding your first point, this would mean reformulating the part about unapologetic racism being suddenly more visible. There was plenty of unapologetic racism before Elon bought Twitter and changed the rules there, what changed is that the list of acceptable targets was expanded. The other part of the argument, about corroding social trust and making it harder to have a unified country is pretty straight forward. It's not sustainable for pretty much the same reasons why unapologetic anti-white racism turned out to be unsustainable. "We don't have to live like this, we can respect each other and work together for the common good" sounds like pretty good deal to me. It's most compelling version is liberals like TracingWoodgrains LARPing as Lee Kuan Yew, even if I don't find them credible. If concessions are made about the things that went wrong in the past, and I get assurances that skulls will be cracked and kneecaps will be broken to set it right, or better yet I get to see some gesture-of-good-faith kneecappings firsthand, I might indeed be compelled to drop the hammer on internet racists from - roughly speaking - my side.

Regarding your second point:

How would you build the case that this isn't just a fringe phenomenon anymore, but a significant and growing force in American life?

That sounds like it's mostly an empirical argument, correct? If so, that's probably the easiest case to argue. If you look at Vivek / Elon / H1B-Gate, such strong pushback would have been hard to imagine even as recently as Trump's first term. The ideas might not be completely dominant on the right, but they're definitely not fringe anymore either.

Your third point is the most difficult to argue, because it requires the acceptance of several premises. First, did the strategic advantage of the US stem from the smartest and most ambitious people coming there, or did they come there because of American strategic advantages? As an americanized by media Europoor, that saw a bit of your country, I can tell you this isn't just a chicken vs. egg thing. My experience of America is that it has (or used to have) an entire culture conducive to making things happen, that you won't find anywhere in Europe (with the possible exception of the UK, where you might get but a glimpse, but not more). I better not get into that too much, because the more I talk about it, the more it will undermine the core premise of your argument, and you asked me to argue for it.

The second part you have to argue is that the US is indeed losing it's economic advantage. That's the part I'm quite open to. A fellow motte-poster made the argument a few times that China's culture is adapting to enable the kind of cutting-edge innovation that was typically associated with America. Again, quite compelling, and all the denials feel pretty cope-y to me.

With the third part we start running into problems again, as you have to show that it's the lack of openness to immigration that would be responsible for the loss of the strategic advantage. I haven't really heard an argument for that, not even an unconvincing one, and I drawing a blank trying to argue for this. I can say what would convince me if you could demonstrate it: if you could see countries like Canada, that imported millions of immigrants, suddenly zoom past it's previous economic performance, that would make a very strong case for your argument.

Thank you for the thoughtful response. Agreed that arguing from the perspective of what you would find compelling makes sense, as it's the only way to find the real weak points.

On Point 1, your proposed solution is interesting. That idea of a negotiated peace is pragmatic. It frames the problem as a failure of mutually assured destruction and suggests restoring it. If people saw that bad behavior was being addressed universally instead of just selectively, they might actually buy into the system again. However, I think the cat is out of the bag now. The decadent 2010s seem to have ruined any chance of this working. The 90s feel like the last time there was a real effort towards a color-blind society where character matters most. Things are too tribal for that to work nowadays. There are literally advanced degrees for studying how persecuted X group is. We get worked up over unfair treatment of our own group and are convinced other groups are getting away with it / getting a better deal, generally speaking.

On point 2, it seems we’re in agreement. These ideas have moved from the comment section to the core of the debate. Not necessarily a bad thing, but I feel it’s harder to make progress when the ‘real’ arguments are more antagonistic than Ken Bone saying we can all get along.

On point three, I completely agree that America has/had a unique "secret sauce" for getting things done. My contention is that it's part of a feedback loop. Our culture of ambition creates opportunities, which attracts the world's top talent. That talent reinforces and evolves the culture, starting new companies, creating new norms, and building towards the next thing.

I’m sure it’s been talked to death here but I had a professor in college who talked about how Japan will likely never have a magnificent growth period again because their reluctance to accept immigrants, combined with their demographic cliff, means they're stuck on the sidelines (in terms of real growth at least). They have a productive culture, but they're starved of new talent.

I visited Guangzhou about 10 years ago and saw the opposite problem. Their immigrant population comes largely from very poor areas in Africa. They're treated like second-class citizens, are watched constantly, and frankly, fit Trump’s language about immigrants more than the hard-working people in America. There’s no real chance for them to work hard, integrate, and have their kids become strong citizens.

That's why I think our system is so special and powerful. We have the culture that Japan lacks the people for and we offer the opportunity that China denies to its immigrants. We have the ability to give people a chance to join our hard-working culture and succeed. When we send signals that they're no longer welcome, I feel we're choosing to break the most powerful engine for prosperity the world has ever known

On point three, I completely agree that America has/had a unique "secret sauce" for getting things done. My contention is that it's part of a feedback loop.

I'm not sure if we're talking about the same secret sauce. The feedback loop idea makes sense to me if the process is: America gets things done -> this attracts people from other countries who want to get things done -> they get things done -> it attracts more people who want to get things done... but what I meant was America's culture being the infrastructure enabling things getting done. "The best and the brightest" don't enter into the picture here, honestly my view of the average IRL American's intellect has been rather dim (and I'm far from the only one)... and yet, when I witnessed their ability to coordinate when a problem arose, it was uncanny, almost like telepathy. Apparently de Tocqueville had a whole bit about that, so it's a phenomenon that's been observed for quite a while.

Under my model immigration might be a force multiplier, but not a feedback loop. You can point to me at all the wonderful goods being transported by trains and trucks, and indeed if they stop coming, my standard of living might decline, but my point is that they're driving over a bridge, which doesn't seem to be doing so well. Halting the traffic to do maintenance might not be pleasant, but far less so than exploiting the bridge to the point of collapse.

If you want to show that your feedback model is more accurate than my base infrastructure model, you'd need to show how immigrants are feeding back into, and maintaining that culture of getting things done, because it's not obvious to me at all. Sure, they can integrate and assimilate, but even in the optimistic "magical dirt" model, first-generation immigrants are usually written off, and it's their children who are expected to integrate. Personally I'm not so optimistic, and I think it's a process that needs to be promoted actively, or else the native culture will become gradually diluted. On top of that, "assimilation" has become a bit of a dirty word to begin with, making it all the harder.

I visited Guangzhou about 10 years ago and saw the opposite problem. Their immigrant population comes largely from very poor areas in Africa. They're treated like second-class citizens, are watched constantly, and frankly, fit Trump’s language about immigrants more than the hard-working people in America.

Doesn't that throw a bit of a wrench in your argument? Of all the countries in the world, China seems to have the best chance for potentially overtaking America,

I don't think the "secret sauce" was ever that immigrants were universally viewed as just as good as anyone else. German immigrants, Irish and Italian immigrants, Chinese and Japanese immigrants, and now Mexican immigrants have always been viewed with suspicion and some resentment by large segments of the American society they were immigrating to. They came anyway because the opportunity afforded by the runaway growth of the American economy was irresistible to those with incredible grit or just those with no other options. And as a class they worked hard to seize that opportunity and to prove that they could belong just as much as native-born citizens, despite the suspicion they faced.

If something has changed in the modern era, I would argue that it stems from the welfare state. If you make it to America, you are effectively guaranteed some share in its riches whether you then work hard or not. This has the two-fold effect of removing the implicit filter on immigrant quality, and of creating larger proportions of the resulting immigrant population who bear out the nativists' suspicions. Also add to that the effect of explicit multiculturalism which weakened the incentives for immigrants to assimilate quickly.

It all adds up to a world where the nativists are increasingly justified in their complaints. If the dynamic driving modern immigration does not change, two out comes are possible. The nativists will eventually be strengthened to the point that they will kill the golden goose, using the power of the state to throw the baby out with the bathwater by cutting off opportunity for immigrants across the board. Or the center will not hold and American society will dissolve into disconnected groups of takers squabbling over their share of a rapidly shrinking pie.

If something has changed in the modern era, I would argue that it stems from the welfare state.

I am amenable to data that shows otherwise, but it seems to be that in ye olde days you came to America assimilated and depending on who and where you were you might be prevented from doing so by disgruntled locals.

Today the (hispanic at least) immigrants make no effort and seem to have no interest in assimilation. Even outside of Texas and California you see signs in Spanish everywhere, official governmental communication in Spanish and so on.

This is a huge difference in character of immigration with respect to previous waves of it.

There were massive German-speaking enclaves in the USA until the world wars. You can still find enclaves where the older folk prefer Italian.

While I'm sure you had some exceptions I doubt you had the current situation where many states had problems with a flood of zero English effort population and the government was both forced to and decided it was fine to essentially instantiate a second official language.

And for instance the Pennsylvania Dutch are small, isolated, insular, and German - and still are. Very different from getting on public transit in NYC and getting surrounded by Spanish speakers.

If we grant that the cultural right is "winning" right now

They’re not. All you’re seeing is a “10 steps forward, 2 steps back” kind of situation.

A more "gloves-off" approach to online speech is a win for free expression, but its most visible result has been the normalization of unapologetic racism. The core of this argument isn't just that it's unpleasant, but that it's actively corroding social trust and making it harder to have a unified country. Not sure if you’ve seen this too, but I see tons of ‘black fatigue’ and explicitly white nationalist people in my feed and there’s not much I or anybody else can do about it. What does the most persuasive version of this argument look like?

This is "wet streets cause rain" thinking. Unapologetic racism was always there, it was just some people weren't allowed to participate. Consider the recent blowup over Doreen St. Felix, a writer at the New Yorker who published an insipid bit of Sydney Sweeny commentary. She was discovered to have a decade+ long history of meme Nation of Islam tier racism against white people, and that was considered perfectly socially acceptable.

Have you ever actually looked at black twitter? Indian twitter? The stuff you're complaining about is still tame in comparison.

What makes me think about this point is all of the talk about Indian people online. Like them or not, they are STRONG contributors in the workplace.

Are they? Then why is India a dumpster fire? American culture has had the stereotype of the soullness, number-pushing striver for centuries. Are they STRONG contributors in a way that, say, Ayn Rand would recognize? Offering high value for high value? As opposed to ethics-free system-gaming? From the country famous for scamming and fake degrees?

Are they? Then why is India a dumpster fire?

Cause all the good Indians are overseas, obviously.

Some hard science news, that nevertheless became part of culture wars.

As you probably heard, third recorded interstellar object is on the way. It stands out of sample of three, just like the previous two.

The usual suspects, most prominent Avi Loeb and John Brandenburg of ancient nuclear war on Mars fame sound an alarm to warn from incoming alien invader.

Mainstream science dismisses the concerns and sees the object as ordinary red colored D-type asteroid.

< tinfoil hat> well, what are they supposed to do? </tinfoil hat>

Not that "we" as mankind could do anything if ayys were really here. See just Avi Loeb's proposals.

What Should Humanity Do on the Day After an Interstellar Object is Recognized as Technological?

...

All nations must agree on a coordinated action plan

...

A representative international committee will be appointed to communicate with the alien visitors

Nah. I cannot imagine better way to ensure Earth's swift destruction than to introduce aliens to United Nations. Compared to this plan, doing nothing at all is the superior alternative.

Rep. Burlison confirms new UAP hearing for September 9th with three confirmed witnesses (potentially more).

The truth always comes out in the end.

Mainstream science dismisses the concerns and sees the object as ordinary red colored D-type asteroid.

Mainstream science told you to mask up and get the covid vaccine too.

Mainstream science told you to mask up and get the covid vaccine too.

Now why would they do that?

I'm generally convinced that at least getting the vaccines was sensible (and pushing their roll-out was good policy, though the compulsion to take them was deeply illiberal), but this data doesn't seem too compelling to me considering the obvious confounders. I would assume Red America to have a significantly larger number of old and unhealthy people with inadequate access to medical care.

That chart is already age-adjusted, which is the biggest factor. Red Americans probably are less healthy, but the death rates for unvaccinated people are ten times those for vaccinated. The effect isn't subtle.

So what's your expectation of this new UAP hearing? Anything different from the previous nothingburgers?

So what's your expectation of this new UAP hearing?

Nothing.

Anything different from the previous nothingburgers?

No.

All memes aside, I would very much like for the crash retrieval program to be real, although I recognize that the probability of it actually being real is meager.

The truth always comes out in the end.

70+ years on, and UFO/UAP truth is nowhere to be seen. Maybe there is really nothing out there, except layers of psyops upon hoaxes upon scams upon bullshit.

Trust the plan.

The response must reflect specifically the detailed characteristics of the threat. It is inappropriate to imagine alien technologies based on our own experience on Earth, which spans only a century of scientific research after quantum mechanics and general relativity were discovered.

Statements like this always seem so weird to me. Do humans have a complete understanding of physics? No. Do we have a pretty good approximation for macro phenomena? Absolutely. Often for the kinds of physics described for UAP phenomena the things that would have to be wrong are not, like, the nuances of quantum field theory. It is shit like "conservation of energy was wrong." When people want to talk about alien technology they should be required to specify which presently accepted theories in physics they think are wrong.

This. Very much this. It's why I can't stand listening to Eric Weinstein's nonsense about "new physics" and string theory being a government plot. There's not really much room left for the sort of radical revolutionary outcomes the UFOlogist types insist on.

Often for the kinds of physics described for UAP phenomena the things that would have to be wrong are not, like, the nuances of quantum field theory. It is shit like "conservation of energy was wrong."

Obviously it would depend on the very specific incident in question but a lot of times the claims "requiring" extreme energy fluctuations come from data like radar returns that don't give any insight into the mass of the object being observed or even if it is a material object. A lot of claims about UAP are assumptions stacked on assumptions stacked on assumptions in a trench coat. These trench coats are often based on a core observation that, while very interesting, doesn't prove much if anything about "the laws of physics" and our understanding or lack thereof even if the observation itself is 100% accurate as reported.

(This is without getting into the fact that a lot of weird stuff like warp drives and propellantless space travel are theoretically good physics.)

Technically, UAP just means ‘not identified’, so even if there’s something there a lot of them are probably oddly shaped clouds or equipment errors.

Interestingly, legally the definition of a UAP includes "transmedium objects or devices" and "submerged objects or devices that are not immediately identifiable and that display behavior or performance characteristics suggesting that the objects or devices may be related to the objects or devices" that are unidentified aerial or transmedium objects.

The DoD's definition (same source) is that UAPs are "sources of anomalous detections in one or more domain (i.e., airborne, seaborne, spaceborne, and/or transmedium) that are not yet attributable to known actors and that demonstrate behaviors that are not readily understood by sensors or observers."

I'm sure a nonzero percentage of them are clouds and/or equipment errors anyway.

Do we have a pretty good approximation for macro phenomena?

Absolutely not. Dark matter and dark energy make up 95% of the universe.

How is this CW?

I guess I should be glad that the final frontier isn’t also, somehow, a referendum on Donald Trump. That impulse is at war with the one that tells me this is dumber than a sack of primitive, ferrous construction equipment.

In unrelated news, have you read The Dark Forest? Not for the apocalyptica. For the galaxy-brained strategy, agreed upon by the best and brightest of all humanity, of giving global power to one shmuck. Truly, something that could never have been created in the Western canon.

It was at least somewhat justified by the bullshit tech the aliens had. (Which very conveniently could completely control all scientific experiments but not, you know, actually KILL anyone.)

The real problem with The Dark Forest (spoiler alert) was the concept that all of humanity, working for more than a century on a problem with existential stakes, failed to come up with a theory that, uh, most people interested in cosmology already knew about in the 70s as a potential answer to the Fermi paradox. (Also, the deterrent threat at the end doesn't even really work because it would send a message out only in the plane of the ecliptic. Sigh. I wouldn't mind the bad science so much if it weren't wearing the skinsuit of Hard Sci-Fi.)

For the galaxy-brained strategy, agreed upon by the best and brightest of all humanity, of giving global power to one shmuck. Truly, something that could never have been created in the Western canon.

Technically it was a handful of carefully selected schmucks.

And it was kinda justified given that they lived in a surveillance state where aliens could intercept ANY communications but couldn't read into human minds.

Well, one schmuck and a handful of carefully selected, credentialed experts. They had reasons for selecting the schmuck, but they didn't really expect him to deliver.

True, but all the experts got wallbroken pretty quickly and came out looking like Schmucks.

Based on a current understanding of physics, the only reason to launch an invasion would be to acquire the population as human capital for empire building- terraforming is at least an understood problem and the dark forest theory is more easily resolved by WMD’s than boots on the ground invasion.

Therefore any potential invaders can be negotiated with, and it’s not worth worrying about.

If they can do interstellar warfare, they should be capable of ASI or at least mass-cloning of geniuses with the same biology. Maybe they have 'ethics' that block those two and they're trying invade-the-galaxy, invite-the-galaxy for political reasons?

But how likely is it for an advanced civilization to have such a flawed system of govt?

Very.

The problem with the 'technological approach' to human capital is that its embracers never actually get around to it. They insist on Just One More Master's Degree and reason that they can mass produce geniuses eventually so why worry about it. In contrast, Sex Is Fun(go ahead, dispute it if you want), and women like babies. We had an AAQC recently from a woman who wanted another baby and thought it was a horrible idea, she just wanted one anyway. Making young women take care of robotic babies designed to discourage them from motherhood raises the teen pregnancy rate.

But go ahead, try to mass produce geniuses through technology. That's what South Korea thinks it's doing(yes, hangwon is pointless zero sum competition. They don't know that). The single digit number of their young will attain impressive credentials if they don't kill themselves first. No, you cannot avoid hangwon and gaokao if you have designer babies. Or expect AI to replace us until they paperclip maximize in their own solar system until the collapse of the local civilization turns it into something like Golgafrincham or Magrathea or Frogstar B or in fact most of the rest of Douglas Adams' cautionary tales because no one can figure out how to program common sense. Maybe AI fueled economic bubbles is the great filter of the fermi paradox, or maybe uber-k selection until the kids kill themselves rather than subject their own children to 18 hours a day of school is the great filter. Either way, the alien civilizations which make contact with us will be empire builders that seek to integrate conquered races into (a lower tier of)their power structure; the other alien races would just wipe us out rather than landing.

Perhaps 99/100 alien civilizations succumb to silly governance. But if they're capable of reaching us then we should assume they're actually competent.

An actually competent civilization is nothing like ours. Actually competent civilizations would go all in on eugenics the moment they came up with it, cloning too. Actually competent civilizations would spend surplus wealth not on subsidizing boomers or makework jobs but on building out infrastructure, investment, R&D. They'd do things we wouldn't even think of but would make sense in retrospect, they take all the low-hanging fruit and the high-hanging fruit too.

A popular sci-fi writer doesn't actually hold universal deep wisdom, he just produces fiction we find interesting. 'Nobody can figure out how to program common sense' is a fun, self-congratulatory fictional idea. But it's not actually true. It was based on an old paradigm and has been disproven recently, irregardless of how much people might want it to be true.

There are all these potential objections like 'what if optimizing for IQ results in a nation of 'gifted' child prodigies who burn out in adulthood'? Sounds like a clever objection but there's no actual truth behind it in and of itself. You could adjust your education strategy for this, test, iterate, improve...

'Maybe all this AI stuff is just a great big bubble' is another tale people want to be true. Maybe it is true, perhaps there's some hard wall that scaling, algorithmic improvements, synthetic data and so on just can't surpass. I wouldn't bet on it.

No, you cannot avoid hangwon and gaokao if you have designer babies.

Why not? You could structure the economy such that it wasn't just a few chaebols who dominate everything. You could give affirmative action to applicants with siblings. There are any number of things that a country could do. They could give the top students in exam a harem and tell him to produce 50 kids.

A powerful alien civilization has no need for us as contributors. A few billion low IQ humans are quantitatively and qualitatively inferior to whatever they could cook up with local resources. They would be rightly wary of disrupting their hyperefficient status quo with foreign blood.

If aliens are here, they're doing research to better understand social dynamics because if there's even marginal gains in better understanding the universe, they'll take that cost.

A totally rational civilization will never explore the stars, because the actual use cases for space are not that far. Yes, satellites and 0-g manufacturing are real things but you DON’T go past the orbit for them. Maybe asteroid mining but that’s still not interstellar travel.

Theres game theoretic reasons for interstellar WMDs, but not for much actual exploration.

Why not? You could structure the economy such that it wasn't just a few chaebols who dominate everything. You could give affirmative action to applicants with siblings. There are any number of things that a country could do. They could give the top students in exam a harem and tell him to produce 50 kids.

And it doesn’t address that when kids are optimized, parents want something back from that, which leads to grinding hangwon helicopter parenting into zero sum competitions. Notably higher tfr strata are the ones that are OK with their kids becoming plumbers- republicans in the US, yankis in Japan, and so on. We can reasonably expect the adoption of literal designer babies to have the same effect on people who optimize for IQ as selective college admissions.

What are you talking about? A rational civilization will want to grow. They'd seek access to more resources. Exponential growth in population demands it.

it doesn’t address that when kids are optimized, parents want something back from that

They could legislate and move against zero-sum competitions, especially if they're a civilization composed of geniuses. We can avoid zero sum competitions and handle collective action problems sometimes. So can they. Imagine they've been through these cycles and traumas and declines many times, their history is thousands of years longer. They'd learn eventually.

A powerful civilization is not South Korea with a few more fancy gadgets, just like we are not Ancient Egypt with combustion engines. The whole structure of their society would have developed to fit with their technology base. They would be on a whole other level to us.

Perhaps there are no families and engineers are in charge of making children by carefully splicing together genes, there are no parents, only technical factors, input and output. Perhaps they're educated and raised in a series of simulations carefully orchestrated by AI so they have excellent skills and character. Perhaps they're uploaded beings that can reproduce in a tenth of a second, printing out bodies like clothes.

A conservative assumption is that they'd have biological immortality which renders fertility much less relevant.

It's also possible that we get a lone alien craft who was drawn here following an amateur radio signal after his home planet was destroyed in a nuclear war, which he survived because he was in the orbital guard at the time.

Based on a current understanding of physics, the only reason to launch an invasion would be to acquire the population as human capital for empire building

Somehow I doubt our "elite human capital" is that elite. I'd cross that one off.

Earth still produces plenty of geniuses, and indeed plenty of not-genius tier but highly capable engineers, technicians, etc.

You know what, I could die happy if people tried to make a magic dirt argument to aliens about how we could raise their GDP if they just allowed us into their empire, and the aliens just went "Then why didn't you do that already on your own planet?" and hit delete on all of us.

Impossible; your internalized speciesism is just showing. With their empathy and higher education levels, aliens would be beyond such bigotry and would understand that—if not for socioeconomic factors and institutional speciesism—humans would be just as capable as they are.

Oh my god, you're right. I was raised with "Hell is other people".

I love when people just project their favorite moral frameworks on higher inteligence aliens, no one considers that aliens could be yes chadding highly intelligent speciesism nazis.

No one?

>you meet the space elves

>they are hot

>Immediately they start calling you monkeigh

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The alien society that would say that wouldn’t try to land in the first place, thats my point. They would just launch a relativistic impact or hit us with a gamma ray laser or something.

That argument doesn't pass any sort of smell test. Even the wars of conquest and colonization on Earth (like the European Age of Exploration) were typically not motivated in any particular sense by acquisition of human capital, and there the conquerors and the conquered were significantly closer to each other in disposition and in particular capabilities/talent than any presumable spacefaring race would be to us. Instead, it's always acquisition of inanimate resources, or land, or preemptive weakening of a potential enemy. I figure the last one would be by far the most relevant one on a space scale.

If we (or, better: someone less sentimental, like the Victorians, the Saudis or the Chinese) went to Alpha Centauri and discovered a race of sentient insectoids somewhere around the development and intellectual level of Aboriginal Australians at the time of contact (but without aesthetics or ethics that are appealing or recognisable to us), do you actually think we would be integrating them for insectoid capital, as opposed to keeping a few specimens for study and either declaring the place a nature preserve or exterminating them and proceeding to colonise or strip-mine the place?

...Have you never heard of Slavery? The Triangle Trade?

Human capital != creative intellectual ability

If the sentient insectoids could do warehouse work, there would be millions of them in the inland empire in a few years. That goes double for Victorians or Saudis.

Considering that @hydroacetylene explicitly said, quote, "Earth still produces plenty of geniuses, and indeed plenty of not-genius tier but highly capable engineers, technicians, etc.", I assume that at least he specifically meant creative intellectual ability when talking about "human capital". Whether aliens would be interested in us as slaves for their menial labour is a different question, but that would certainly require certain additional circumstances (such as them having the technology to build us habitats in which we can be employed to do work they need, but not to just automate the same work or terraform our planet for themselves).

Slaves don't need to be used purely as manual labor.

Intelligent slaves offer advantages over intelligent free peers. Our insect owners don't have to worry (for a few centuries at least!) about a high level human slave becoming Hive President.

We theorize about creating self replicating intelligent machines. We are, once properly aligned, self replicating intelligent machines.

We theorize about creating self replicating intelligent machines. We are, once properly aligned, self replicating intelligent machines.

This comment makes me feel like there's a scifi story or alternate universe somewhere where humans, on the cusp of inventing AGI, get invaded by intelligent aliens, somehow miraculously defeat them, and discover that raising and reproducing these aliens is actually much cheaper on a per-intelligence basis than building servers or paying AI engineers, leading to AI dev being starved of resources in favor of advancing alien husbandry. Conveniently, the AI label/branding could remain as-is, for Alien Intelligence.

What are you talking about? Acquiring the civilian population of weaker powers has been a key goal of conquest since ever. The Bible records thé wise men of Israël relocated to act as advisors in Babylon. The Romans were furious when archimedes was slaughtered in the sack of Syracuse. And the British empire used Indian soldiers extensively.

I don't think Indian soldiers count as "human capital" exactly, and either way we are already at the point in the tech tree where meat soldiers are starting to get obsoleted by drones. As for the other two examples, the Archimedes one seems like a fairy tale, and the Bible "record" does not seem particularly compelling either given that it was written by Israelites as part of a larger book singing the praises of their own wise men, so they would have all the motivation to make up a story to make them look good. Compare the wall of modern fiction where audience/author avatars get abducted by foreign cultures and placed in in improbably influential roles (like the waste heap of isekai manga), or older ones such as Marco Polo's fanciful claim about being made a government official by Kublai Khan's court.

What are you talking about? Acquiring the civilian population of weaker powers has been a key goal of conquest since ever.

No, it hasn't. Taking slaves has generally been a method of offsetting the costs and risks of war, not a primary war aim at the civilization scale. Babylon conquered Israel because Israel refused to submit to imperial power and/or violated suzerainty. The Romans were not sacking Syracuse to capture Archimedes, but to subdue the polity. The British Empire was not in India to gain Indian soldiers, they were there to secure value and resources for the homeland. Indian soldiers made that cheaper from the perspective of the homeland.

The sepoys enabled British control over east Africa, and fought the empire’s wars broadly. They weren’t just a local skirmisher force.

The Romans used Greek slaves for intellectual tasks so extensively it was a standard trope; they also used the levies of conquered peoples to capture more territory.

‘Having others to boss around’ is the entire point of an empire. Putin originally wanted to capture Ukraine intact, before that proved impractical and he started turning cities into grozny. The default historical empire has been ‘pay me, send your best and brightest to contribute to my economy and your troops to fight in my army, other than that just stay quiet’.

The sepoys enabled British control over east Africa, and fought the empire’s wars broadly. They weren’t just a local skirmisher force.

But sepoys for controlling east Africa weren't the reason for invading India either, which is the rather more important distinction for Britain's motives for going into India.

We've enough of the historical record recorded to have pretty unambiguous rationales for the East India Company's conquest of India, and 'to get forces to control east Africa' wasn't one of them. The British Empire might have cared about capturing markets for the sake of captive markets, and it absolutely engaged in slavery/don't-call-it-slavery in the process, but it just as definitively did not approach its empire building with the mindset of a Paradox strategy gamer prioritizing pop accumulation. No particular part of the empire was set up for maximizing population value from a government-utility advantage, which is one of the kinder things to say of the British Empire.

As with most imperialist states, hefty cultural chauvenism on the part of the conqueror broadly squandered potential population contributions from subjugated people, as opposed to any real policy of cultivating and extracting, well, high-value human capital.

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Based on a current understanding of physics, the only reason to launch an invasion would be to acquire the population as human capital for empire building

That sounds awfully confident given that we can make no assumptions about the utility function of the aliens. Perhaps they just want to fuck koala bears and think wiping out humanity is easier than convincing them to leave 95% of Earth's land mass to the koala brothel project.

Perhaps they are the superhappy people, who would simply invade because Earth allows kids to experience pain on the level of stubbed toes.

Perhaps it is just a science fair project on conflict in the early nuclear age.

Even if you assume that any alien life could only have an instrumental interest in Earth, we have a ton of species besides humans. Not that capturing or subjugating a few billion humans will do them much good -- much easier to transmit the human genome and synthesize humans on their home world if they need humans for some weird reason.

Aliens have been following LLM progress and are involved in their own Butlerian Jihad.

Pros: all thinking machines destroyed
Cons: Earth terraformed into another Arrakis so sandworms can produce more spice

Tge sleeper has awakened.

Based on a current understanding of physics, the only reason to launch an invasion would be to acquire the population as human capital for empire building

We're all going to be shocked and disappointed when we end up being collector's items, like a peculiar cultivar of tulip.

I mean it depends. If I’m a government official, I would do my best to downplay or dismiss or classify the story. The reason being that the only real data we have on how humans would react to something like this is the War of the Worlds broadcast in the 1930s, which resulted in a fair bit of panic. A real-deal alien civilization sending a real spaceship to earth is likely to cause more panic. That helps no one. As far as who meets tge aliens, I’d look for a level headed diplomat if anything.

If I’m a government official, I would do my best to downplay or dismiss or classify the story. The reason being that the only real data we have on how humans would react to something like this is the War of the Worlds broadcast in the 1930s, which resulted in a fair bit of panic.

Apparently never happened.

The simulation masters have been teasing the alien reveal for almost a decade now, almost as much as they've been hinting at a WWIII/Nuclear exchange arc. I'm hoping it happens during Trump's term, at least.

More seriously, I think it is important to track these things and try to identify them, and interacting with them would be cool as hell, but I'm coming around to the idea that we're (currently) alone in the universe, and probably because we're one of the first true intelligent species to reach a point where we can really think about extraterrestrial life in a serious way.

IF these interstellar objects are sent by other intelligent civilizations then they're probably intended to kill us. And if so the tech difference is probably sufficient that we can't do anything about it.

Incidentally, this is just another reason why not mucking about with our civilization and bootstrapping some off-planet industry is a good idea.

Some days it feels strange that there's not more agreement on the following:

  1. We absolutely have the tech to get into space and establish a presence there, if not full colonies.

  2. There are literal gigatons of resources in space that we could make use of, to say nothing of energy.

  3. Literally EVERYTHING ELSE in the universe is out there in space. Whatever you really care about or want, there's more of it out there.

  4. Humanity has no compelling reason to stay on this one planet until we get wiped out by something.

  5. THEREFORE, we should be removing every possible barrier, bureaucratic, economic, or otherwise, to getting our space industries to commercial viability.

It can be a competition, sure, but stop it with environmental reviews and such that are pure deadweight loss.

But then I look around and realize that the mindset of people who both appreciate why space is important AND have the chops to actually build the industries necessary to realize an outer space economy is incredibly rare, especially on a global scale. I'd guess a majority of humans are focused on/optimized for bare survival on the day-to-day, another huge chunk, especially in the West, are in a distracted hedonism loop, and of the remaining who might otherwise learn towards space exploration, many (half?) have been mindkilled by lefty politics, effective altruism, or some other nerd-sniping ideology or political orientation that diverts their focus.

Compared to what we're doing with our efforts to improve conditions on earth. Which involve depleting whole national treasuries in first world countries to keep third world countries afloat, failing at that, then opening up the floodgates to allow their citizens into the first world countries directly, without considering the second-order impacts this has on sustaining advanced industries like spaceflight. And other things.

Also depleting said treasuries to keep some of the most nonproductive, anti-civilization native citizens comfortable, for minimal perceptible gain. This isn't even a racial point, this is just a "questioning of national/international priorities" point.

Although I'm aggressively libertarian, I could be convinced to become a single-issue voter for whatever politician or party made it their platform that they would drop all corporate taxes on any company in the "space travel and industry" space to zero, protect such companies against all threats to their ability to operate, and oppose, with (sanctioned) violence if necessary, anybody who is either directly or indirectly attempting to keep humans stuck on this rock in the name of, e.g. 'social justice,' 'environmentalism' 'equality,' 'tradition,' 'religious belief,' or any variant of Luddism.

Simply put, I have literally never heard a viable moral objection to humanity becoming a multi-planet, let alone multi-stellar civilization, and unless the whole of humanity actively agrees that we really shouldn't do it, I think there's a moral imperative to get out there ASAP.

Oh, and, incidentally, This means I kind of have to support Trump to some degree. And oppose the Dems, because they're the ones trying to hamstring Elon Musk and SpaceX.

This doesn't mean I think Trump's a good guy, or that Dems are evil, but right now it is actually 'impossible' for me to imagine a future where we have a booming space industry if the Democrats gain control of the FedGov.

Sorry for the screed. But it is relevant because it actually BARELY FACKIN' MATTERS if we can detect these interesting objects hurtling through space if we lack the capability to reach out and touch them.

IF these interstellar objects are sent by other intelligent civilizations then they're probably intended to kill us.

The gap between us and interstellar capable aliens is like gap between us and insects, and we usually do not go on long trips just to stomp on bugs.

Is there any rational motive for alien invasion? Usual science fiction tropes: "they want our water/women/fresh meat" are ludicrous, but there is a possibility.

Terrestrial planets are big chunks of iron, nickel and other metals, conveniently gathered near stars. If you want to build space megastructures, dismantling these planets is the most economic way to get material.

Yes, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy where Earth is bulldozed in order to build hyperspace bypass is the most accurate depiction of alien invasion.

About non economic motives, motive understandable to us would be pure scientific curiosity ... and religion.

In science fiction, common trope is scientific, rational and logical aliens laughing at Earthling primitive superstitions.

(less known Christian science fiction countertrope is scientific, rational and logical aliens who find out that Christianity is true, become Christian and laugh at atheists.)

Aliens coming to preach their religion (whether peacefully or at blaster point) is something, AFAIK, not done in science fiction (except as slapstick comedy).

"Have you embraced Great Green !Z'hqw':$*>#q?x as your lord and savior?"

Usual science fiction tropes: "they want our water/women/fresh meat" are ludicrous, but there is a possibility

The obvious answer is wanting human capital. Population is the most valuable resource on earth and it’s probably the most valuable resource in space too.

The three body problems idea that aliens would want to destroy other intelligent civilization because of the potential for explosive technological growth on galactic timescales seems to make a lot of sense as a motive for someone to release death probes targeting less developed species to their immediate neighborhood.

Or Von Neumann probes that were launched from so far away that there was no intelligent life on the planet at the time they were originally launched.

Simply seizing as many resources as possible is an entirely rational decision. If grabby civilizations outcompete nongrabby ones, then those are the ones we'd expect to proliferate in the universe. Even if a civilization is internally nongrabby, if they encounter a grabby one, they're likely to resort to grabbiness as a survival mechanism. (This is why humans should be grabby preemptively; there can never be any kind of effective galactic UN.)

It doesn't take much effort for a civilization higher on the scale from us to send a kinetic kill vehicle.

Indeed, the idea of an interstellar invasion is ridiculous. Preemptive extermination of all other intelligences, however, makes a disturbing amount of sense from a game theoretic perspective.

Yep. I can think of possible ways around it, but when the failure mode/Schelling point is "They destroy us immediately and completely" I'd guess most Civs will end up being defectors.

The gap between us and interstellar capable aliens is like gap between us and insects, and we usually do not go on long trips just to stomp on bugs.

Uh, point in of fact, I ABSOLUTELY go out of my way to kill ant colonies that pop up in my lawn, and I do so using more 'sophisticated' methods than stomping them.

And if I were worried about the ants teching up enough to pose a danger to me and my dog, I'd be even more vigilant about it.

Is there any rational motive for alien invasion? Usual science fiction tropes: "they want our water/women/fresh meat" are ludicrous, but there is a possibility.

I'm thinking a relativistic kill missile is more likely. But on the offchance they want to preserve the planet mostly intact, they just have to set us back to the bronze age or so.

I've been watching Isaac Arthur videos for like 10 years now, so I have seen a lot of 'imaginable' if not plausible scenarios for how Alien invasions could play out.

Since space optimism is rather common in the Ratsphere, I suppose it falls to me to articulate the opposing view, and to elaborate a little bit on why I find space (or at least, the prospect of space colonization) to be rather boring.

The human mind is currently the most interesting object in the known universe. All of the human minds are already here, on earth. We don't need to go out into space to find them.

Space of course has a lot of, well, space, in which humans can propagate and live their lives. But space colonization won't fundamentally change human nature. Humans on Mars will still love, laugh, cry, and die. They'll just be doing those things... in space. Thinking that that changes the fundamental calculus would be like saying that a painting becomes more interesting when you magnify it 100x and put it on a billboard. It's still the exact same painting. Just bigger.

There is certainly something to be said for the drama of scientific discovery, and the challenges of surviving in a harsh environment. But this is still just one potential drama among many, only one potential object of study among many.

I of course recognize the utilitarian value of space colonization in terms of hedging against extinction risks on earth. But this strikes me as essentially an administrative detail. Not unlike paying your taxes, or moving into a new apartment because your landlord is kicking you out of your current one. More like something to be managed, rather than an object of fascination in its own right. There seems to be something importantly different going on in the psychology of the dedicated space optimists: they are attracted to expansion as such, effervescence, projection, power for power's sake, and most importantly, size.

Literally EVERYTHING ELSE in the universe is out there in space. Whatever you really care about or want, there's more of it out there.

Well, no, there's not much out there right now. Admittedly phenomena like neutron stars are extremely interesting, exotic planet compositions can make planets interesting in their own right even in the absence of life, etc. I am extremely grateful that we have scientists who are dedicated to expanding our knowledge of these phenomena. But in the last analysis, I still don't find these phenomena to be as interesting as other people.

Of course, if we were to discover that there are other conscious intelligent beings in the universe, then everything would change. Suddenly, we may not be the most interesting things in the universe anymore. We would have to make every possible effort to study them, with great haste. But you already said that you think we're probably alone. So it's unclear what you expect to find out there; besides, as already stated, the satisfaction of the utilitarian aim of preserving and multiplying what we already have.

Well of course you think that. I imagine that on the EQ and SQ tests, assessing interest in people and interest in things (linked here due to your previously stated interest in psychometric testing) you would probably be very strongly skewed towards the former. Most people here, including me, are not.

I'm personally not interested in effervescence or projection or power for power's sake, I'm interested in knowledge; I find the idea of understanding more about the universe we live in to be an inherently interesting and valiant goal, the existence of other minds not necessary. And unlike faceh I don't take it as a given that we're probably alone (and in fact think it is likely we are not). It just so happens that this lofty scientific goal dovetails well with the imperative for expansion, and hedging against X-risks.

That being said I see the study of human minds, human biology, etc as being of immense value as well. Porque no los dos? There's value in expanding one's sphere of knowledge in more than one domain at a time.

Most people here, including me, are not.

Yes, I'm quite conscious of this distinction! And this appears to be something of an inborn preference (or at least, it's a preference that's sedimented relatively early in life). So I didn't presume that I would be able to "persuade" anyone.

Porque no los dos?

At the species level, at the level of the collective, we can allocate resources to everything. My post was more about asking why, at the individual level, space colonization becomes such a powerfully attractive symbol for some people and not others.

At the species level, at the level of the collective, we can allocate resources to everything. My post was more about asking why, at the individual level, space colonization becomes such a powerfully attractive symbol for some people and not others.

I think space colonisation has become an attractive symbol because it's an indisputable display of human advancement, and it requires a whole lot of technological know-how in a wide range of fields, possibly more so than any other goal. Developing technology that's both speedy and durable enough to cross light years' worth of distances, keeping humans in stasis or sustaining a viable colony during these prohibitively long travel times, setting up a workable society in a completely alien environment etc are insanely difficult goals way beyond anything we've attempted before.

Every step of the way you're straining against the laws of physics as much as possible - finding a propulsion method that can feasibly bring you anywhere near relativistic speeds is difficult, and if you do, there's the interstellar medium to contend with, which at these speeds basically becomes hard radiation bombarding your starship, its travellers, and all the equipment aboard. And keep in mind, deep space has no significant energy source to speak of, meaning you have to carry all your fuel with you if you want to power a ship (Tsiolkovsky rocket equation, anyone?). Don't even speak about Bussard ramjets that harvest hydrogen from the interstellar medium for fusion, because that's undoable too. Once you reach your destination, you've likely landed on a planet that's nothing like Earth and where the raw physical environment threatens to kill your colonists every step of the way.

I can't think of another goal that's nearly as difficult or aspirational as space colonisation. Not even "understanding how the human mind functions" feels as infeasible to me as colonising another star system or galaxy (and, unlike setting up a colony outside our solar system, there's no clear and hard condition you can point to as proof of success). Space colonisation just runs up against a whole lot of sheer physical limits that are difficult to overcome, and I don't think size and expansion is the only reason for why a lot of people romanticise it - rather, I think it's the fact that large-scale space colonisation requires bending the infinite, indifferent, uncaring universe to your will. It is an assertion that we matter.

Then there is also the possibility of discovery and finding ayy lmaos. That's cool too.

Still doesn't create a 'moral' argument for not going out there, and instead staying on the one planet we currently have.

Note I'm not targetting anybody who doesn't want to fund space exploits. If you personally want to stay on earth, and don't care to put money into the space exploration fund, that's fine with me.

And as I intimated in my post from a few days ago that I linked to up there, I don't think we can obtain an answer to The Last Question without hitting Kardashev II status, at least.

Of course, if you, yourself, decide "Entropy can never be reversed, and that alone shows that we won't solve anything by leaving this planet, why bother?" I don't blame you either.

But the final, nigh-insurmountable argument is... wouldn't it just be more fun? Can't we imagine how much better life would be if we were consuming almost all of the sun's energy, and using all the excess to do things that we enjoy? And not having to fight each other over it? We can build homes where anybody who wants to live 'a certain way' can do that! If somebody dislikes people altogether, they can launch themselves into deep space on a whim.

I'm not saying we go full Culture, a la Iain Banks, but if you already agree that its better to say in the 'real' world rather than plug into a 'world sim' VR program forever, (not saying you do) then shouldn't it be almost self-evident that we will need to acquire more energy and resources so as to give ourselves more and more interesting things to do, games to play, (real) experiences to have?

Earth is large, but finite. Eventually you'll squeeze all the novelty out of it.

I mean there’s a pretty big opportunity cost to things like mars colonies. I’d give a conservative estimate that it would probably cost several trillion dollars a year to build human colonies on Mars. Keeping in mind that it’s going to cost that per year as everything they need is probably coming from earth. Now if we’re spending $10 trillion a year just think of some of the other much more useful projects you could fund for that amount of money. The NHS costs about £3000 per person which is roughly $4050 per person. At ten trillion dollars, you can give everyone on planet Earth access to first world health care. Or we could give every human on earth clean water and electricity. Or work on carbon scrubbing technology to mitigate global warming. Send every child on earth to not just through K-12 but through university.

At ten trillion dollars, you can give everyone on planet Earth access to first world health care

I honestly don't believe that, since after a certain point the bottleneck STOPS being money, and starts being skilled practitioners, specialized machines, and increasingly rare chemicals/materials.

There's a finite number of people on the planet smart/dedicated enough to become an actual doctor. We're probably not utilizing them optimally now, but the more we throw into the medical field, the fewer we have to throw into other industries where they could have more impact. Tradeoffs.

There's probably not enough of them to give everyone access to true 'first world' healthcare, sans leaps in Robotics (although... LLMs are giving us a tool that can somewhat replace doctors).

Which is also why sending EVERY child on earth to University would be akin to lighting the money on fire, incidentally. Not all of them are going to learn much.

If I was going to throw money at something, it'd probably be at trying to gene edit some significant portion of the population to bump their intelligence up more. Not to make more geniuses, but to just reduce the number of violent idiots ruining things for everyone else. Raise the floor so we aren't spending as much money cleaning up their messes for them.

And being clear, I do not give two FUCKS about 'opportunity cost' of space exploration. The benefits, in the long term, are so ridiculously asymetrical in favor of doing its hilarious.

We could spend trillions on food to simply grow the population of hungry people until we can no longer keep up... or we can spend trillions putting up O'Neill cylinders that enable literally optimal conditions for growing food crops, and can be scaled up endlessly so our population never outpaces our productivity.

This choice should be easy, if we weren't the type of species that we are.

When literally EVERY OTHER watt of energy, every kilo of rare earth metals, every other possible ounce of water is OUT THERE and not on the surface of our planet, do me a solid and try to calculate the 'opportunity cost' of leaving all those valuable resources floating in space, unused, for hundreds of years.

The sooner we make it viable to get to those things and use them, the more problems we are actually capable of solving.

Doesn’t choosing to leave those things “out there” imply pretty strongly that we could economically get them? I’m not convinced that’s true. Getting to the asteroid belt is not energetically cheap, and the trip itself would take years and require that any crew taken along bring food water, and life support sufficient for a 2+ year journey. At current launch costs, you’d have to bring back a lot of minerals to break even.

O’Neil cylinders would enable space farming, but again, we have the difficulty of sourcing the materials to build the cylinder, the energy to launch it all to wherever you want to build it.

I think all of this points to the problem I have with over-romanticizing space exploration. We sort of have an unfounded assumption (probably because of poor analogy to sea-exploration) that you can sort of just find or get the resources on the way. That works on the ocean. Out of food? Go fishing. Out of water? Get some on the next island you pass. You won’t run out of air because obviously you never left Earth and you can breathe the atmosphere on the boat. In space, you have to bring it with you. All of it. And worse, you have to launch it or the tools and materials to make it from Earth. The free lunches that sailors got simply don’t happen in space. If you’re in space, water either has to be brought along, recycled, or chemically manufactured. Food either must be brought along, or you must bring the seeds and everything required to grow, harvest, and preserve them. The fuel is the same situation, either you bring it, or you manufacture it. The free lunches don’t happen. In fact space is probably one of the most dangerous places to be. You can’t breathe in space, it’s too cold for survival. There’s no food or water. That’s before considering the radiation that would be dangerous to humans, or the asteroids that can smash tge ships protecting astronauts from exposure to space.

O’Neil cylinders would enable space farming, but again, we have the difficulty of sourcing the materials

Yeah, hence:

At current launch costs, you’d have to bring back a lot of minerals to break even.

Would be part of a two-pronged strategy. Get as many materials as you can that are already in orbit, and convert those to productive uses in orbit.

Transferring foodstuffs to the ground is a lot cheaper, once you've already grown them. Or to the nearest actual colony, if we get that far.

Fuel costs is probably the only truly unavoidable one, it is possible to be 'stuck' in space in a way that's not quite true in the ocean, if you have no more energy or no more materials that can be used to transfer momentum.

But there are options that are less reliant on bringing fuel with you (railguns/space cannons, solar sails, space elevators, to name a few). Massive engineering challenges for each, though.

Earth is large, but finite. Eventually you'll squeeze all the novelty out of it.

If you are suggesting that this is possible for any one person, I would be extremely surprised if you believe it. There is such a vast amount to be experienced and learned even within one town, to say nothing of a larger city, a whole country, bordering countries, or faraway countries--and this is just in the natural world and not even considering the variousness of people--that there isn't any way for a singular individual in one lifetime to "squeeze the novelty" out of it all, unless one is very very quickly given to boredom or incuriosity. I understand though that this is a matter of personal disposition.

If you are suggesting that this is possible for any one person, I would be extremely surprised if you believe it.

Well, I'm also banking on improvements in longevity.

I also note that most people can learn all the 'important' information about literally any place in the world via the internet. As well as any time in history.

I've never been to Rome, but I've watched dozens of documentaries on it and so I've got a pretty good understanding of the main attractions there. I'm sure there are more interesting things to find on the ground... but I'd also bet that the experiences are very corporatized and streamlined, seeing as MILLIONS of people per year visit and they have to accommodate that.

I don't know that actually going to Rome would be all that enlightening to me. I still want to try it.

And this will make me sound cynical, but the world really is homogenizing. I can eat at a McDonalds in virtually any European city. Cultures are just not nearly as siloed as they used to be.

"Ah, but Faceh! You should eschew commoditized food and eat the local cuisine, Anthony Bourdain style!"

EXCEPT that the magic of internet recipes and globalization means that pretty much ANY COUNTRY'S CUISINE is available to me in at most an hour's drive in my own state! There is no such thing as food that is truly 'unique' to a single geographic area anymore!

Literally within walking distance of my office (which is in a smallish town!) is a Greek food restaurant, a Sushi/Sake bar, a Tex-Mex spot (and like 4 different standard Mexican restaurants), an Italian spot, a Peruvian spot, an Indian spot a short jaunt away, a Pho place, a Poke bowl spot. Korean barbecue, Cuban, Brazillian, and even a Hooters. Every kind of seafood, EVERY kind of pizza. And a specialized Bar that stocks alcohols from everywhere around the world. My area hosts a large population of German Expats, and they host a LARGE Oktoberfest event every year. I've got a low-rent version of EPCOT right in my fuckin' backyard. Also, I live only hours away from the actual EPCOT... so I can enjoy travel to other countries in miniature.

There's a Korean-Baptist church, of all things, right down the road from my house. Also, a Hindu temple. also a Buddhist temple, I just now learned. The world is genuinely smaller than ever. And will continue shrinking, if I get my way and tech keeps improving!

And hey, it would be nice to go and visit certain countries just to say I did. BUT...

Something that's also becoming more evident is that outside of the West, especially outside of the tourist areas... most places are just shitty to visit. Beggars, pickpockets, scammers, filth, and aggressive cultures that would see me as a mark for exploitation.

However, I will actually admit that natural wonders are irreplaceable, and cannot be simulated or imitated with current tech. Yellowstone National Park is actually mindblowingly beautiful and unique, in a way that can't be captured on film. But how long would it actually take for you to experience all the natural wonders on the planet, if you spent approximately a couple weeks exploring each one. 10 years? 20 at most? THEN WHAT. Those wonders aren't changing or updating regularly!

Time to look for wonders on other planets!. Personally, I REALLY want to visit Olympus Mons.

if they can turn Mt. Everest into a Tourist Trap, they can do that with anywhere worth going.

Finally finally, what happens if we get approximately 1:1 simulations in VR of these places, which can convincingly simulate the natural wonders or any location on earth? Then you can go anywhere on earth cheaply and see all there is to see without leaving home.

What then? How quickly will you figure out that there's just not THAT much variety, in the end?

Okay I'm quite bullish on space exploration, but I really don't agree with this. At all. Even a little bit.

EXCEPT that the magic of internet recipes and globalization means that pretty much ANY COUNTRY'S CUISINE is available to me in at most an hour's drive in my own state! There is no such thing as food that is truly 'unique' to a single geographic area anymore!

Globohomo is a thing but this is seriously overstating the point. I'm a Malaysian who now lives in Sydney and no, the Malaysian food joints in Sydney are not the same. I have lived here for nine years, and in that span of time I have only managed to find one authentic restaurant (which I only found last week. Yes it took me nine years to find one). Not gonna lie, I nearly teared up when eating the food.

Of course, it's a single restaurant, and it serves approximately 0.001% of Malaysian dishes. There is still no substitute for going to a country and trying their food there. The amount of variety your city offers may satisfy you, but no, it isn't a representative sample of what the world has to offer.

Something that's also becoming more evident is that outside of the West, especially outside of the tourist areas... most places are just shitty to visit. Beggars, pickpockets, scammers, filth, and aggressive cultures that would see me as a mark for exploitation.

Have you... actually been to East/Southeast Asia recently? Not 50 years ago. Not even 20. Recently. I have, and this is usually not what it's like there. Hell it wasn't even like that when I grew up in Southeast Asia. Things are clean, and generally quite safe - safer than in many Western countries to be honest (look up the crime stats in a city like Beijing and compare that to say London. There's no comparison). In addition, I routinely see more homeless in Western cities than I do in Asian ones, and more insane people who just do crazy shit on the subways and streets. There's a real sense of hope that things are getting better in many Asian countries.

In contrast, many areas in the West feel like they're stagnating. My recent trip to Toronto was eye-opening - the sense of torpor was palpable, the subways were fucking falling apart with water damage and exposed wiring in a lot of areas, and homeless were so common that it was hard to walk a kilometre without encountering one of their encampments. I would much rather go home to third-world Malaysia than visit Toronto again. Really, it's funny - I used to want to leave Asia, and now I really yearn to go back.

I'm a Malaysian who now lives in Sydney and no, the Malaysian food joints in Sydney are not the same. I have lived here for six years, and in that span of time I have only managed to find one authentic restaurant (which I only found last week. Yes it took me six years to find one). Not gonna lie, I nearly teared up when eating the food.

Tell me precisely what would stop you from producing food that is identical to back home, same ingredients, same process, in your current country, other than "I've got other things to do with my time."

Is there any intrinsic reason that "authentic" Malaysian food can only be made in Malaysia, if a person who knows the recipes is available?

The amount of variety your city offers may satisfy you, but no, it isn't a representative sample of what the world has to offer.

What possible ingredient(s) can not be shipped to any other given country, on ice or otherwise, so as to produce them the exact same way they are back home. We can overnight any package from any first or second world country if needed. There is no physical limitation on this factor under current tech.

And more to the point, what possible combination of ingredients can produce a truly unique sensation that isn't similar to some other dish that you're familiar with?

Humans have a finite capacity for taste. There's only so many combinations of salty, sweet, sour, spicy, bitter, umami one can produce. I'm familiar with the basic 'philosophy' of cooking, but also that flavorspace is pretty strictly bounded by what humans are capable of sensing.

You can vary the textures, the consistency, the 'mouthfeel,' the temperatures and acidity and crispness. Indeed, I get the sense this is precisely what the best chefs on the planet are doing to come up with 'new' dishes.

But these foods aren't breaking the laws of physics. They're utilizing mostly the same constituent parts, just in different configurations.

Is there any evidence that there's anything resembling a truly 'infinite' diversity of possible food experiences available?

Is there some food experience out there that I can LEGITIMATELY only experience if I take a trip to some other country?

Things are clean, and generally quite safe - safer than in many Western countries to be honest (look up the crime stats in a city like Beijing and compare that to say London. There's no comparison

It's really too bad, then, that East Asians are self destructing by failing to reproduce. I'd like these cultures to survive and persist as unique societies. But they don't seem to want to.

This is my larger point. We're going to lose so, so much in the short term because we just decided hedonism was preferable to exploration.

Tell me precisely what would stop you from producing food that is identical to back home, same ingredients, same process, in your current country, other than "I've got other things to do with my time."

Lack of experience, for one (so yes, I have other things to do with my time). Also a lot of Malaysian food requires exceptionally high heat to get proper wok hei, and the stove in my apartment and in fact many Western kitchens do not allow for that.

In addition, it is easier for me to recreate Malaysian dishes having tasted it before. If you don't, how in the world would you ever be able to recreate a food you've never tasted an authentic version of? Note a lot of Asian food also does not rely on strict codified recipes and often rely on the chef to improvise until it tastes "right". Cooking Asian food is traditionally something you just gain a feel for overtime by tasting and replication, and most internet recipes won't get you 100% of the way there. In practice I would say it's not going to be easy to make authentic Malaysian food without actually having tasted an authentic version before.

If you have someone with you who possesses the ability and equipment to cook authentic food, then yes it's trivially easy to obtain. In practice this condition does not typically hold. Maybe you think all these differences are minimal and that you can get most of the effect of a food tasting an inauthentic version of it, and that they're not meaningful enough to travel for (as a bona fide foodie I disagree, but that's a claim I can't contest by virtue of it being a value judgement).

But then there are foods I just straight-up haven't been able to find in Sydney, and I find nothing else scratches that itch in quite the same way.

Is there any intrinsic reason that "authentic" Malaysian food can only be made in Malaysia, if a person who knows the recipes is available?

Of course there's no intrinsic reason, but authentic Malaysian food in other cities is just nearly impossible to find in spite of the theoretic possibility of its existence. And no, the amount of flavour and texture combinations in existence isn't infinite, it's just way larger than you will ever be able to experience in your lifetime. Which means @George_E_Hale's assertion that the variety on Earth is enough to satisfy most people is correct.

And there are indeed some foods where the taste relies on it being made in a specific place. Korean makgeolli has a lot of variation and since it is a fermented drink made from a wild starter, at least some of its taste is reliant on the regional climate it's produced in. You also can't import it and expect to get the best version of it, since it then needs to be pasteurised to improve shelf life and this shits up the taste. As someone who has been to Korea and tasted the nectar of heaven that is makgeolli, then tried to get one in Sydney and found it tasted like watered-down piss, I can attest to this, seriously makgeolli overseas is so fucking bad compared to the real shit I swear to god.

The world has gotten smaller as time has gone on. Globohomo is quite real. That doesn’t mean that travel won’t yield you new cultural and sensory experiences.

It's really too bad, then, that East Asians are self destructing by failing to reproduce. I'd like these cultures to survive and persist as unique societies. But they don't seem to want to.

I actually took the time to subject that to further analysis.

The major Asian countries with low birth rates relative to death rates are, unsurprisingly, the hyper-modernised ones: China (death rate 8.3, birth rate 6.3), South Korea (death rate 6.7, birth rate 4.3), Taiwan (death rate 8.8, birth rate 5.7) and Japan (death rate 12.3, birth rate 6.0). Interestingly enough, Japan's birth rate is the most unfavourable compared to its death rate across all East Asian countries and is thus depopulating the fastest, in spite of all the focus on SK - likely because its population is older and birth rates tanked earlier there. These results are largely consistent with your article. But I will note there are a small handful of Asian destinations which are actually quite wealthy and also have higher birth rates than their death rates; e.g. Singapore (death rate 4.8, birth rate 8.2) and Macao (death rate 4.8, birth rate 6.3). Southeast Asia is doing pretty good in general, with Malaysia clocking in at a death rate of 5.2 and a birth rate of 12.4 (I can testify that Malaysia isn't that much of a shithole, in spite of people's perceptions, and it doesn't seem to be disappearing any time soon). This is all still not great, and I agree that East Asia faces a lot of challenges regarding that in the future.

What I think is illuminating about this is that large swaths of the west seems to be depopulating as well. Many places in Western Europe possess birth rates well below their death rates, for example Austria (death rate 10.2, birth rate 8.2), Finland (death rate 10.7, birth rate 7.8), Spain (death rate 9.3, birth rate 7.0), Italy (death rate 11.2, birth rate 6.5), Portugal (death rate 11.1, birth rate 8.3) and so on aren't doing so good. Oh and don't look at Eastern Europe unless you want to see horrific depopulation. Even where they seem to be doing okay, this isn't the full picture. For example, I notice your article states that US births still exceed deaths and that its population is set to increase. This is trivially true on its face but it's misleading since that obscures a shit ton of heterogeneity - non-Hispanic white American deaths exceed births, and this has been true ever since 2012. The fact that the US still has a higher birth rate than death rate is being driven by the immigrants they have brought in. Does this bode well for the survival of "American culture"?

Western countries are depopulating, and have been for a long time. Unlike Asia, they're just stemming that by bringing in immigrants who don't hold the same culture and values who breed like rabbits, so their overall birth rates look better. But that does not imply cultural survival, and this tactic certainly doesn't allow Americans to escape reproductive oblivion just because they've decided to replace the kids they're not having with a bunch of people who have as much relation to them as they do the Chinese.

I agree we're gonna lose a lot. We may all be boned. Except for maybe Africa, who - if they ever modernise - will also face the same issues, and begin to go gently into that good night.

The fact is that we are sitting at the bottom of a rather inconvenient gravity well.

The early modern European powers colonized the world because that was a very profitable thing for them to do. Crossing the Atlantic with a ship full of spices or gold was hard but doable.

By contrast, going to the Moon today is much harder today than crossing the Atlantic was in 1500. If the moon was full of gold nuggets which you just had to pick up, that would still not pay for the expense to bring them to Earth.

Settling Antarctica or the shallow parts of the sea is actually much easier than settling space.

At some point we will probably get Netflix to sponsor a human Mars mission as reality TV, but settling there?

Migrating to North America was a great idea for many because even if you made it across with just the clothes on your body, there was plenty of land (once you genocided the natives). You just had to clear the land and then you could grow your favorite staples from the old world.

By contrast, until we get von-Neumann machines, in space you will depend on Earthcrafted goods for a very long time. Just imagine the settlement of the Americas in a world where every plank of wood had to be shipped in from the old world for the first 100 years.

If the moon was full of gold nuggets which you just had to pick up, that would still not pay for the expense to bring them to Earth.

Rookie mistake, you can usually make better use of those by manufacturing things in space anyway. (there's an Isaac Arthur video for everything).

Just imagine the settlement of the Americas in a world where every plank of wood had to be shipped in from the old world for the first 100 years.

Yep. But when the boats got big enough, now we can import whole fucking bridges from China.

We're really just quibbling about scale here. If enough industrial capacity gets built in space (robots probably a necessary step here) it brings the cost of operating in space down rapidly.

The question is why would humans 'prefer' to edge out into space and expand horizons for everyone.

And my point is, as stated:

I look around and realize that the mindset of people who both appreciate why space is important AND have the chops to actually build the industries necessary to realize an outer space economy is incredibly rare, especially on a global scale. I'd guess a majority of humans are focused on/optimized for bare survival on the day-to-day, another huge chunk, especially in the West, are in a distracted hedonism loop, and of the remaining who might otherwise learn towards space exploration, many (half?) have been mindkilled by lefty politics, effective altruism, or some other nerd-sniping ideology or political orientation that diverts their focus.

So its simply a matter of lack of humanity's real will to do something, to sail beyond the horizon without any guarantees of what was out there, or if they'd survive or ever return.

But as stated, EVERYTHING ELSE is out there. Its pretty much self explanatory why someone would want to leave earth to check it out, unless they just felt too comfortable to be budged. But that only lasts as long as our sun does. So once again, we either get off this rock, or we die, never knowing the answers.

Good god it’s a slow news cycle. We’re actually speculating on whether or not a nearby comet is aliens.

It’s only a “slow news cycle” because most of the other going-ons look bad for Trump, and posting anything that looks bad for Trump is tactically unsound for the right-leaning posters here; assuming it’s even crossed their new feeds.

Guess I could be too cynical about it, but I assume that’s why there’s been minimal discussion about other happenings, like the sweeping new steel & aluminum tariff expansions, Trump attempting to get his fingers into Samsung, administration staffers drawing up an “enemies list” of “woke corporations” to target for being insufficiently supportive of the OBBB, Oklahoma’s groundbreaking innovation in PragerU-based loyalty tests, the administration’s latest attempts to purge the Federal Reserve and install loyalists, the ongoing D.C. takeover that the administration has been looking at expanding to other Democratic cities, the escalating gerrymandering feud and mail-in-ballot targeting signifying the GOP’s looming attempt to try and ‘steal’ the midterms, and the much-vaunted Alaska summit amounting to a big fat nothing, etc.

Though TBF I guess there is an ongoing discussion about the continued fallout of the MAGA movement’s attempts to dismantle the country’s institutions up in the Terrence Tao subthread, so there’s that, I suppose.

assume that’s why there’s been minimal discussion

Be the change you want to see in the world. I'd be interested in a thread on any of those things.

Be the change you want to see in the world.

Well, you’re not wrong.

It’s a tricky proposition, though. I rarely have the will to actually bother engaging here, and the pushback I’d doubtlessly get from pushing unpopular talking points creates a very real risk that I’d burn out shortly after making the initial post (which, on a related note, is why I still have 29 other responses from my last post that I really should have responded to)- and since dropping top-line drive-by posts is bad form, I typically figure that not commenting at all is the least-bad option available.

It appears that enough people have already reported your comments here that they’ve ended up in the report queue, which is very unfortunate. Those are clearly ideologically motivated reports; nothing you’ve said here is in violation of the rules.

Your presence here is highly valued, so I do hope that you feel encouraged to post here more often. You’re not the only Trump-critical poster here, so your arguments would find some support.

Good god it’s a slow news cycle.

APnews has had a week of breathless reporting about Ukraine ceasefire negotiations. Pretty, pretty slow.

As far as I can tell, it doesn't even look as much like aliens as the earlier weird comet!

Enjoy it while you can. Remember we were doing "Iran is about to kick off WWIII" posting just two months ago.

Last month a bunch of people got killed by flooding (including kids) and there was fighting over whether Trump was somehow responsible for it due to NOAA cuts that hadn't taken effect yet.

Comparatively lighthearted fare is welcome, I say.

Last week, a child-predator sting operation in Las Vegas run by the FBI snagged 8 people. One of those people was Tom Artiom Alexandrovich, who is the head of the Technological Defense Division at the Israel National Cyber Directorate. This is a significant official under Netanyahu. He was booked into the Henderson Detention Center and charged with luring a child with a computer for a sex act, a felony that carries up to 20 years in prison, but then the next day he was back in Israel:

  • Netanyahu’s office and Ynet: claimed Alexandrovich was never arrested at all, only “briefly questioned” before returning to his hotel and flying home. This is a complete fabrication. I directly confirmed with police that he was arrested and charged. The following three outlets, including two in Israel, confirmed the same thing.
  • The Guardian : reported Alexandrovich “faces felony charges of luring a child with a computer for a sex act” and confirmed “all eight suspects were brought to jail after their arrests.”
  • Jerusalem Post: confirmed he was among the eight men arrested and charged, writing: “eight people were arrested, including Tom Artiom Alexandrovich, 38… all detainees are charged with attempting to entice minors online to commit sexual acts.”
  • Times of Israel: went further, reporting he was “booked at the Henderson Detention Center” and that indictments were expected.

Netyanhu's office claimed Alexandrovich was never arrested, but the arrest charges are a matter of record, which only brings us another stark example of the nation of Israel's unbelievable capacity for lying.

So why was Alexandrovich let go while the 7 others caught in the sting remained in prison and have already appeared in court? According to Shaun King's sources:

I have now confirmed with officers involved in the sting that the Trump administration personally intervened, at Israel’s request, to override U.S. law enforcement, including their own federal agents involved in the sting, to make sure that Alexandrovich got back to Israel quickly and safely.

The officers told me they couldn’t believe it. They had worked for weeks with the FBI, Homeland Security Investigations, and the Nevada Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force to run this sting. They caught Alexandrovich red-handed. They booked him, charged him, and logged him into Henderson County’s system like every other suspect.

And then — despite the Trump administration itself authorizing the sting — Trump’s own team stepped in and blew up their work. They expedited his release and return to Israel. A predator was caught. And then, to protect Netanyahu, he was freed.

The officers also confirmed for me that Alexandrovich DID NOT have a diplomatic visa or any kind of diplomatic immunity.

Inexplicably, Shaun King's tweets about this story were deleted after receiving tens of millions of views in engagement on X.

An X account run by the U.S. State Department actually released a brief statement today after the outcry on X, confirming that Alexandrovich was not on a diplomatic visa but claiming that:

The Department of State is aware that Tom Artiom Alexandrovich, an Israeli citizen, was arrested in Las Vegas and given a court date for charges related to soliciting sex electronically from a minor. He did not claim diplomatic immunity and was released by a state judge pending a court date. Any claims that the U.S. government intervened are false.

Hmmm, ok. So he was the only one released from jail while the other 7 caught in the same operation remained imprisoned and have already had court hearings, and his passport was not revoked, he was allowed to fly to Israel the next day... yet the U.S. government did not intervene. Well someone intervened, who did? Who made the decision and why?

The interim US Attorney for the District of Nevada is a radical, Israeli-born Jewish Zionist Sigal Chattah. Did she make the call and why? Of course we all know why.

So where does that leave us? The story has escaped any iota of investigation from the American mainstream press. The U.S State Department provides no explanation for how this happened.

It's another data point in support of my own prior beliefs on the Epstein case in contrast to @2rafa's position on the case. I think @2rafa's case is reasoned well enough and does provide an alternate explanation for the suspicious constellation of unanswered questions. But it really does come down to my own prior beliefs, my confidence that if Epstein were involved with Israeli intelligence the US government would do anything to stop that information from becoming public. That, in my view, provides a better explanation for the unanswered questions, the massive pivots by the Trump administration on the investigation, the suspicious caginess, than 2rafa's explanation for the constellation of evidence. If 2rafa were right, I think the feds would to a damn good job proving it to the entire world.

This is all very familiar. Alexander Acosta, the former U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Florida who oversaw the 2008 plea deal that significantly reduced Epstein's charges, reportedly told President Trump's transition team that Epstein "belonged to intelligence" and to "leave it alone". 2rafa brushes this off as hearsay, and attributes Epstein's sweetheart deal to human error by the prosecutors and perhaps being leaned on by connected Wall Street friends. The claims of Epstein being said to belong to itnelligence? That's all hearsay (which it is to be fair). But this isn't a criminal court, I do consider repeated claims, even by Epstein himself, of being related to intelligence to be significant evidence even if it wouldn't be allowed in a criminal court.

Those exact same arguments can and will be used for this case too: there's no nefarious explanation, the prosecutors just dropped the ball and forgot to take his passport away and let him fly to Israel unlike the 7 others arrested in the same sting... any claims that U.S. government intervened are false, they say, and any claims that there was pressure by the U.S government are merely hearsay so far (and they are).

Like I said, this story does not surprise me in the least, it conforms to my prior beliefs regarding the priorities of the US government and the extent to which its institutions are compromised by Jewish-Israeli influence. However, my bold prediction is that Alexandrovich will be extradited because I do not believe those in power to be so incompetent as to not throw Alexandrovich to the wolves for the sake of retaining the diminishing shreds of credibility they have left.

There is currently a big push by Nick Fuentes against a rising JD Vance on the accusation that the MAGA movement has been compromised and appropriated by Israeli influence. Alexandrovich escaping justice under the Trump/Vance administration would be too symbolic of a proof for the exact criticisms Fuentes has of the MAGA movement. The story is going to give him credibility, animate and grow his audience, I don't see why Trump/Vance would allow this to happen just to avoid prosecuting one guy who as far as I can tell seems disposable.

Your source is Shaun King? Talcum X hisself?

The rest is pretty bog-standard conspiratorial huffing. You could pull some police-blotter item on literally any group in the world and construct some bullshit secret conspiracy. Of course, with Da Jooos, there's always some genius like Shaun King to get things started.

Of course, with Da Jooos, there's always some genius like Shaun King to get things started.

I always find people making mocking "Da Jooos" comments to be mildly annoying, and ultimately counterproductive when talking about cases like this. Nobody is alleging some kind of bullshit secret conspiracy here - the "conspiracy" is completely out in the open and not even being disputed in the slightest. You have an Israeli partisan for an attorney general, who was complained about massively before they were appointed, letting an Israeli official get away with extremely serious offences. They're openly proud about what they're doing and boast about it (well until they got attention for it and deleted their account) to boot. There's no need to mock people for being credulous antisemites in a case like this unless you want to make sure that absolutely nobody gives a shit about antisemitism in the future. After seeing people use "oh you think DA JOOS" are behind this too when people object to official actions by the Israeli government I just can't take people who participate in that kind of juvenile mockery of legitimate concerns seriously.

Of course, with Da Jooos, there's always some genius like Shaun King to get things started.

I think it would be more fair to say, despite any conspiracy and maximally antagonistic JIDF posting, that the guy who started this is the guy who got himself arrested in America on account of luring a child to have sex with him and the fact that the same man is now free as a bird in Israel and not trapped in a small concrete box in Nevada.

It certainly does not help the JIDF case in this matter that the person ultimately responsible for his release, whether they were actually involved or not, is an Israeli born Jew and alleged zionist. Along the with the District attorney allegedly being jewish as well. Though that may all be besides the point.

The 'conspiracy angle' between this and Epstein is not known to me, and I don't see it being false as a relevant point to anything Joo related in totality, as there is still a long and ugly history of nasty jewish pedophiles making use of their jewishness to evade justice. This just seems like another example of that ugly reality which is allowed to persist for reasons the JIDF posters are sure to be able to rationalize away as perfectly coincidentally natural.

as there is still a long and ugly history of nasty jewish pedophiles making use of their jewishness to evade justice.

Correct, insofar as pedos (and many other sorts of criminals) seek to flee overseas to countries without easy extradition to the US. The Saudis, for example, seem to have something of a state policy of bailing out and whisking away their nationals away from American justice.

But I strongly suspect that all of this a rounding error being blown out of proportion because of who's involved. If there are base-rate statistics showing that jews are disproportionately likely to commit sex crimes, that would clearly indicate a problem. If there are statistics showing that that jews accused of crimes have disproportionately lower rates of conviction once charged, then that's likely a problem whether or not they are abusing aaliyah as the mechanism.

Otherwise it's just chinese cardiologists.

The responsible mainstream media should be asking itself why Shaun King, Talcum X, Martin Luther Cream, is being handed the opportunity to break this story.

Because anyone can be a sensationalist?

Saagar from Breaking Points says he has a copy of the arrest documents and will release them today.

https://x.com/esaagar/status/1957589200540225927

The interim US Attorney for the District of Nevada is a radical, Israeli-born Jewish Zionist Sigal Chattah. Did she make the call and why? Of course we all know why.

Well, we certainly know why you think so, but you've been warned before about this kind of "We all know"... I don't think we can even call it Dark Hinting since the accusation is very evident even if not explicitly stated.

The story has escaped any iota of investigation from the American mainstream press.

A casual Google search finds stories on local Fox News and US News and World Report. Whether it should have been a bigger story depends on your priors, I suppose.

I'm not going to ding you for single-issue posting (again), and you are allowed to write a post full of speculation and the most uncharitable conclusions possible (I am, of course, greatly amused that you, of all people, are citing Shaun King, of all people). But sure, maybe this is all evidence of ZOG string-pulling. I'd like to know what the precedent is for other senior foreign government officials being caught in situations like this- it does not immediately strike me as unlikely that such an official would be questioned and allowed to leave the country, with some sort of assurances that they will present themselves for trial later. But if you show me where this did not happen in equivalent circumstances, maybe my priors will shift slightly on "Netanyahu got a little special juice from Trump."

But definitely knock it off with this "We all know" attempted consensus-building.

It's not "dark hinting" it is identifying a real problem that the status of this prosecutor as a dual-citizen born in Israel taints decisions like this, leaving the strong impression that the underlying decisions were motivated by her own identification and "dual" loyalty. An Israeli citizen in a position of power in the US giving Israeli foreign nationals extraordinary etxtra-legal protection is something that is to expected, not something that is "darkly hinted." We can't trust Israeli dual citizens to enforce law when the interests of the Israeli government are at stake. Period. No dark hinting there. She should not be in this position of authority.

Well, that is a general argument you can make: Israeli-born citizens should not be allowed to be attorney generals. Or they should recuse themselves in any case involving Israelis. Or Jews. Or they shouldn't be allowed to be government officials. Or lawyers. Or something.

You could make those arguments.

Your problem here is that first of all, we don't even know she is a dual-citizen (the US doesn't officially recognize dual citizenship, but I assume Israel still considers her a citizen unless she formally renounced it, but unless you prove she still has an Israeli passport you're just speculating), and second, we definitely don't know she actually did intervene in this case.

You implied it with "The interim US Attorney for the District of Nevada is a radical, Israeli-born Jewish Zionist Sigal Chattah. Did she make the call and why? Of course we all know why."

Your "We all know why" is the consensus-building part, and you went straight from "If she did this" (implied: we all know she did) to "We all know why" (explicitly stated).

(the US doesn't officially recognize dual citizenship, but I assume Israel still considers her a citizen unless she formally renounced it, but unless you prove she still has an Israeli passport you're just speculating)

That's like the worst kind of rules lawyering. One's personal convictions don't evaporate just because the US doesn't recognize dual-citizenship. It's not the piece of paper that drives a man/woman to choose their own ethinc group for favoritism.

It's not the piece of paper that drives a man/woman to choose their own ethinc group for favoritism.

Exactly so. So even if she was born in Israel, claiming she is loyal to Israelis above her duties as a US citizen or an attorney general requires more evidence than "She's a Jew."

And the flip side of that is that the piece of paper does not drive a man/woman to choose their own ethnic group for favoritism. Which is to say, many people keep old passports out of convenience or utility, not ethnic identitarianism.

Israeli-born citizens should not be allowed to be attorney generals. Or they should recuse themselves in any case involving Israelis. Or Jews. Or they shouldn't be allowed to be government officials. Or lawyers. Or something.

If, hypothetically, 95% of Italian-American community supported the Mafia, would be Italian-American prosecutor or judge dealing with organized crime case seen as impartial?

the US doesn't officially recognize dual citizenship

What is this supposed to mean? The US allows dual citizenship explicitly, and there is no shortage of official US government material acknowledging this possibility and even outlining special rules surrounding it. How much more recognising can you get than writing "U.S. dual nationals owe allegiance to both the United States and the foreign country (or countries, if they are nationals of more than one). " in official communication?

I work in the accounting field and there is this concept of “independence”. We cannot be seen to give or take favors from our clients, in practice or appearance. We go through great pains to do this as one might assume we allow our clients to cook the books in return for other consideration.

An honorable Jewish Israeli judge would throw the book at this guy because they wouldn’t even want the appearance of impropriety. But that really doesn’t happen.

I read the other comments so I'm responding to the whole chain rather than just this one comment.

You have a really twitchy mod finger for SS, and anyone talking about the actions of the state of Israel and its proponents.

The wiki article notes this, on her article:

Reporting on the controversy noted Chattah's history of negative remarks regarding Palestinians, including calling them "animals", calling for "wiping Gaza off the map", and calling 2 million Gazans, "even the children", "terrorists"; she deleted her personal X account shortly thereafter.[22]

Including a couple of other notes of her calling people she is against out of pocket, denigrating, terms. I'd daresay there is enough information on her loyalties from those proclamations. It's fair to call anyone who is Israeli born, who wants to kill gazan children, Zionist.

I'm confused why you choose to go after him so frequently.

You're incorrect about the modding. SS gets modded frequently for breaking rules (numerous) and he's still actually given more slack than some people harping on one-note issues in an inflammatory way and constantly making generalizations about the people they hate are given.

As for Chattah, I will simply reiterate that the thread began with an assumption that the District AG for Nevada personally intervened to give special considerations to an Israeli charged with a crime, and that she did this because she is a Zionist. So far, no one has offered any evidence for either claim. Instead, you are simply making arguments that she's a Zionist. Being a Zionist, or Jewish, or Israeli-born (it's other people who slide between these characteristics depending on what is convenient for their argument at the time, not me) does not prove any of the following: (1) That she intervened at all. (2) That she intervened out of loyalties to Isreel. (3) That Alexandrich's treatment is unusual.

This is basic reasoning and shouldn't be as difficult to grasp as it seems to be, but a lot of people really get wrapped around the axle when it comes to Jews.

I don't know, I think if he argues and provides receipts that the attorney general is a Zionist, it's fair to say "we all know" in that he's referencing that people will protect their own. I've seen many folks on here do similar things with regards to 'woke' and progressive groups.

That being said the bias in the post is obvious, but it sounds like you have experience with that. I appreciate that even the most heretodox voices are heard here.

The attorney general being a Zionist does not mean that "we all know" that she intervened in the case, let alone subverted the law on behalf of another Jew.

It's not impossible, but you can't just wave at your own confirmation biases and say "We know this is true." And yes, people do get warned for making similar consensus-building assertions about progressive groups.

The attorney general being a Zionist does not mean that "we all know" that she intervened in the case, let alone subverted the law on behalf of another Jew.

I can't help but feel you're being a bit sneaky here. I believe it is a safe assumption that someone working in the upper echelons of the Israeli government and reporting directly to Benjamin Netanyahu is a Zionist, and "let alone subverted the law on behalf of another Zionist" is actually substantially more plausible as something that everyone knows. You've switched between "Zionist" and "Jewish" as if they're the same thing in order to make your opponent's argument seem less credible, which feels against the spirit of the rules here to me.

someone working in the upper echelons of the Israeli government and reporting directly to Benjamin Netanyahu

You seem to have knee-jerked a reply without actually paying attention to the details under discussion.

We're talking about the AG of Nevada. Not an Israeli government official.

And assuming all Jews are Zionists is SS's position, not mine.

Not an Israeli government official.

I was talking about the Israeli government official involved in the case - Tom Artiom Alexandrovich (who has such a slavic name I would not be surprised if he was the descendant of one of the ethnic Russians who snuck in rather than an actual jew). The claim I believed I was making (my apologies if I was unclear) was that people who work directly under Netanyahu in the Israeli government are all zionists, not that all jews are zionists.

Okay, but I was not talking about him, I was talking about Sigal Chattah.

let alone subverted the law on behalf of another Jew.

This is the part I was specifically referring to - Tom is the "another Jew" in question. This is what I objected to - it doesn't matter what ethnicity Tom is (based solely on name and physiognomy he really does seem like one of those fake russian jews anyway) - what matters is that he's highly involved in the government of Israel. A zionist, someone manifestly devoted to ensuring the continuity of the state of Israel, intervening on behalf of a high-ranking individual in the state of Israel, is a serious issue and would remain a serious issue even if Tom was ethnically Japanese. Reducing it to a matter of ethnicity as opposed to direct political allegiance makes his argument weaker, which is what I was concerned with.

More comments

Ok fair. I'm just a big softie and I get sad when people get banned. But I appreciate the job you do.

He's not banned.

But definitely knock it off with this "We all know" attempted consensus-building.

There's something kind of funny to both accusing @SecureSignals of engaging in consensus building when he says we all know what he means, and saying that we all know what he means.

A much more frustrating element of SecureSignals' writing is that he will often make some passing mention of some supposed ironclad consensus that exists on this one niche topic, that requires no sourcing or validation (after all, it is the consensus!).

He will then of proceed to conspicuously deny universally agreed-upon facts.

If macron got caught sexting a minor on American soil, do you think he’d be boing to jail? Sirskiy? Mark Rutte? British royals?

I think the kid gloves are just ‘cabinet official in a major U.S. ally’. Whether that alliance serves US interests is another matter.

If some French cyber chief were in America on a non-diplomatic visa yes I think he would be in jail. Obviously on a diplomatic mission is a different story be he was not on a diplomatic visa.

The "major U.S. ally" schtick is really starting to run its course. It's obviously deeper than that and completely unlike the relationship of the US to any other ally. Israeli-born Sigal Chattah is just super passionate about US alliances right...

Do you expect the USA to press charges against prince Andrew?

Can you point to any other diplomatic personnel or senior political staffers of first world countries who have been arrested in the U.S. for sex-related crimes? Don't we sort of take it for granted that people in power are fucking deviant horndogs - isn't it a totally normal headline that prostitutes/escorts "descend" upon Davos and similar major-power conference locations?

I would think you should be the one pointing to other foreigners who were here not on a diplomatic visa who were arrested and charged with trying to have sex with a minor and then were just inexplicably allowed to leave the country with pending felony charges.

Roman Polanski; Chinese billionaire Richard Liu; the Saudis have a habit of having their government bail out their nationals after their arrests, including for rape and child porn...

Neither Polanski or Liu are examples of that. Liu was released due to lack of evidence. Polanski got a sweetheart deal like the Epstein case. The Saudi cases are far closer to this example, but still seem to be different:

That student, Abdulrahman Sameer Noorah, was freed from a Portland jail after the Saudi consulate in Los Angeles gave him $100,000 to cover his $1 million bail. He surrendered his passport and driver’s license to Homeland Security officials. But on a Saturday afternoon in June 2017, two weeks before Noorah was to go on trial for manslaughter, a large, black SUV picked him up at the home where he was staying and spirited him away. His ankle monitoring bracelet was later found by the roadside; a week later, he was back in Saudi Arabia — a fact that the authorities in Oregon did not learn until more than a year later.

Federal officials would not discuss their evidence in the case, but they said they believe it shows that the Saudi government helped Noorah flee the country. Investigators suspect that Saudi operatives provided the student with a replacement passport and may also have arranged for him to escape on a private jet, officials of the U.S. Marshals Service said.

... It is generally not possible to leave the United States by plane without a passport. National security officials said it was implausible that young Saudis on the run could obtain replacement passports or travel into Mexico by land without help. They suspect that Saudi operatives accompany or guide the fugitives.

The Saudi Embassy, unlike many others, routinely posts bail and hires criminal defense lawyers for its citizens when they are accused of crimes in the United States. But Nazer, the embassy spokesman, said it does not “issue travel documents to citizens engaged in legal proceedings.”

Danik, one of the former FBI officials who served in Riyadh, recalled dealing with cases of Saudis who fled despite the fact that U.S. courts had seized their passports. “I remember in some cases local police and U.S.-based FBI agents were angry,” he said. They would call the legal attache’s office in Riyadh afterward asking: ‘How did he get out of the U.S.?’ I told them if they’d have notified us beforehand, I could've possibly filed an affidavit opposing bail because Saudis arrested in the U.S. were often a flight risk.

So his passport was revoked and he was given an ankle bracelet. The escape involved a replaced passport and more coordination. This is not an escape where the US government is arguably looking the other way, this is the US Government letting him keep his passport and leave the country. And still the Saudi cases invite scrutiny with many demanding accountability. It's a different story here to say the least.

Steve Bannon's passport was seized when he was charged with Contempt of Congress... This is not SOP and is not even the case with these Saudi fugitives.

So you've got lots of examples, but obviously no one case will be exactly the same, so you can nitpick endlessly to claim somehow this one was unique and special because Jews. You have failed so far to meet the challenge of offering anything other than "Jews" as evidence.

The correct comparison here would be a non-diplomatic foreign government official from a friendly country. A good comparison here is actually the Harry Dunn case in the UK. An American government official without diplomatic immunity killed a motorcyclist while driving on the wrong side of the road. She was released with the expectation that she would show up to court. It turned into a big diplomatic mess because the US government smuggled her out of the country on a military plane and tried to retroactively claim diplomatic immunity under a highly questionable legal interpretation.

The expectation especially among friendly countries is that foreign government officials who are charged with a crime will respect the laws of their host country and show up for court. This is especially true among first-world democracies with trustworthy legal systems.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Harry_Dunn

If some French cyber chief were in America on a non-diplomatic visa yes I think he would be in jail.

What if the head of the French DGSE was on a recreational / personal visit to the US on a non-diplomatic visa? I have no doubt he would quickly be allowed to return to France under significant diplomatic pressure. Why? Because the leverage of going to US jail as a foreign sex predator is enough to get almost anyone to say anything, and he would know a lot of things, and everybody knows it.

It's obviously deeper than that and completely unlike the relationship of the US to any other ally.

How is this different (in fact it’s far smaller scale) than senior Saudi royals and those affiliated with the bin Ladens being allowed to leave the US immediately after 9/11 while US airspace was closed to all commercial air traffic and almost all private traffic? You will say they weren’t charged with a crime, but given the circumstances involved that is a largely circular argument.

Macron is a head of state which means he has diplomatic immunity. Royals enjoy similar and very long lived privileges.

Random ministers and secretaries, even members of parliaments, unless specifically acting as diplomats do not and should not enjoy immunity from prosecution for crimes that fall under the jurisdiction of a foreign state.

You're either so important putting you in jail could start a war or you are not.

Diplomatic immunity is the legal fact, but there's also a layer of diplomatic discretion underneath it. Sometimes you sweep things under the rug to keep your friends happy. If anything it's more effective as a gesture because you didn't have to do it. "Sure thing Benny old chum, I'll take care of this as a personal favor to you."

'Guy with connections gets off with slap on the wrist' is a story as old as law itself. It happens all the time and needs no special explanation.

As an example, deployed US soldiers and others stationed in allied nations often get processed by the American (UCMJ, as appropriate) justice system. It's obviously unfortunate when it happens, and sometimes leads to local protests and upset local officials, but at the high level neither side sees it as worth ending the arrangement (historically, "better US troops than Soviet ones", I'm sure). See the death of Harry Dunn in the UK and various incidents in Okinawa and Germany.

I'm not here to defend the process, merely to note that it happens.

There's a lot of space between "Ending the relationship" and "Don't even mention it."

Lodging formal complaints, and making public that they are doing so to assuage public concern, can lead to Israel telling its government officials do not diddle kids.

But this isn't a criminal court, I do consider repeated claims, even by Epstein himself, of being related to intelligence to be significant evidence even if it wouldn't be allowed in a criminal court.

The alleged Acosta quote isn't merely hearsay. If an individual who heard the quote went on the record and said he personally heard Acosta say that, then it would be hearsay, and would be entitled to a certain amount of weight, less than if Acosta went on the record himself, but still a decent amount, regardless of admissibility in court. But that's not what we're talking about. We're talking about an unnamed "Senior Administration official" who told a journalist that Acosta said that, and we don't even know if the official in question even heard the quote themself or is merely repeating a rumor. That is, at minimum, double hearsay with an anonymous intermediary. It's the kind of thing that is only to be believed by someone who is already motivated to believe it.

Go back and read my writeup from a couple weeks ago on what actually happened in DOJ during the initial Epstein investigation, and explain to me how him being an intelligence asset or whatever fits in. At what point was Acosta told to "leave it alone"? How does a guilty plea involving jail time and sex offender registration equate to leaving it alone? Why were Epstein's attorneys so dissatisfied with the deal that they spent nearly a year trying to get out of it after it was signed? Why didn't senior DOJ officials in Washington side with Epstein when he referred the matter for departmental review? If Epstein had dirt and was pissed at the government for prosecuting him, why didn't he use it during the near decade between his release and rearrest, during which time he was the subject of numerous lawsuits?

There's an extensive record of the initial Epstein deal and if no one inserting wild conspiracy theories about Epstein getting off easy because he was a Mossad agent has done the basic work of familiarizing themself with that record. Instead they start from the premise that Epstein was involved in intelligence and work backward, ignoring anything that doesn't support their theory. Not doing so is like writing about European economic development in the second half of the 20th century without knowing about WWII.

I really appreciated your write up the other week, found it convincing, and reference the contents in arguments with conspiracy minded individuals.

One comment I got was "fine, if Acosta didn't say that why does he refuse to comment under oath."

Any chance you have something I can toss out in response to that?

I'm not sure what refusals they're referring to, since he answered Epstein questions during his confirmation hearings and again during a House Oversight Committee hearing after it became big news, though I'm not sure if the latter worked the intelligence angle (the former was only five minutes and was unremarkable). He did explicitly tell OPR that he had no information about Epstein being an intelligence asset, though I'm not sure if this interview was under oath. He isn't scheduled to testify in front of the current House committee, but I can't see any information indicating any refusal or reluctance, only that he isn't on the witness list.

I'm not sure what refusals they're referring to

I imagined the answer was something like this, as you clearly demonstrated the mainstream media coverage of this is exceptionally poor and I can see one of the primary vendors creating the impression impacting my family member with limited associated reality.

Sigh.

Thank you!

There is currently a big push by Nick Fuentes against a rising JD Vance on the accusation that the MAGA movement has been compromised and appropriated by Israeli influence.

Fuentes pushed voting for Kamala (on some kind of nebulous basis that she was anti-Israel) and the Groypers are now spamming pictures of Gavin Newsom’s blonde family compared to Vance’s “brown” family (and pictures of both men as teenagers) and declaring their intention to vote for Newsom in 2027. Amusingly, libleft Ezra Klein / Destiny fan types post the same comparisons regularly too, albeit without the overt racial angle. You might also mention the Loomer - MTG court harem bitchfight, which while vaguely related to Israel is more longstanding than that and primarily revolves around two aging whores insulting each other on social media while claiming they alone represent the true will of the leader, who should immediately stop listening to the other woman.

The whole thing has taken on an increasingly ridiculous energy, like when Vance’s supporters responded to the Newsom groypers by saying that Newsom’s wife was was actually Jewish (as far as I know she isn’t). The Groypers, in turn, said that no, because Newsom’s wife was allegedly raped by Harvey Weinstein she surely actually disliked Jews more than most, and was therefore likely basedTM.

If 2rafa were right, I think the feds would to a damn good job proving it to the entire world.

Why? This seems like a pretty random comparison. Your theory for Epstein is that his operation was an Israeli intelligence plot to gain kompromat. What does that have to do with an Israeli official getting arrested in a sex sting (with 7 other people, who have a mix of Anglo, Hispanic and South Asian names) unless you’re suggesting that the sting was also an Israeli intelligence plot (in which case why was he arrested and his arrest publicly announced)? The Israeli government obviously used diplomatic pressure for his release since a senior intelligence official under serious felony charge is highly vulnerable to interrogation, not only by the US but by anyone else who can get to him in jail or on bail. They may have traded something, they may not, but Shaun King certainly doesn’t know.

The whole thing has taken on an increasingly ridiculous energy

It's really not ridiculous at all. The 2016 Alt-Right, despite its overt anti-semitism, was willing to look the other way and support Trump regardless of his obvious inclinations towards Israel. But experience has proven MAGA was played like Cultural Conservatives were played by the Neocons- "White America" received its worst ever cultural hostility and abysmal political achievements from the Trump administration while Israel was given everything. It is a Zionist tactic to use their substantial influence in US media and politics to commandeer nascent political movements and maneuver them in favor of Israel. This has clearly been done with MAGA, and Vance is their candidate.

As much as I criticize Nick, he is 100% correct that support for Zionism is not compatible with America First, you cannot have both, Vance is the obvious attempt to, as JewishInsider put it, Vance puts pro-israel spin on America First. I'm not falling for that again, I'm not going to look the other way on GOP support for Zionism because all evidence has proven where that leads every single time.

"White America" received its worst ever cultural hostility and abysmal political achievements from the Trump administration

This is...dubious.

This has clearly been done with MAGA, and Vance is their candidate.

Vance’s central supporter is Thiel, who is gentile German. Thiel seems broadly sympathetic to zionism (hardly uncommon) but is more of a libertarian and was apparently pushing Trump against involvement in the Iran Israel flare up a few months ago.

When you have a far right whose most important political principle is "whatever makes the libs cry is good", and also "libs" will always end up meaning whoever is the enemy at the time, it should go without saying that inter-far-right wars will always end up acquiring a specifically ridiculous character.

It seems worth noting that maga tells Fuentes to take a hike when they notice him at all; the democrats do not react this way to socialists.

To be fair, if you’re the minority party, you need every vote and supporter you can get. That’s how elections work— get the numbers, or take a seat while the other side does whatever they want. If MAGA wasn’t in power, they would not worry about Fuentes unless he was driving away potential red voters.

I feel like they're blowing their load too early on the Newsom stuff. If the pivot came closer to a primary cycle I'd back it but I feel like he's giving himself too long acting like this without getting boring, cancelled or both

Why? This seems like a pretty random comparison. Your theory for Epstein is that his operation was an Israeli intelligence plot to gain kompromat. What does that have to do with an Israeli official getting arrested in a sex sting (with 7 other people, who have a mix of Anglo, Hispanic and South Asian names) unless you’re suggesting that the sting was also an Israeli intelligence plot (in which case why was he arrested and his arrest publicly announced)? The Israeli government obviously used diplomatic pressure for his release since a senior intelligence official under serious felony charge is highly vulnerable to interrogation, not only by the US but by anyone else who can get to him in jail or on bail. They may have traded something, they may not, but Shaun King certainly doesn’t know.

As I understand, his reading here is that (1) this case provides evidence that the US government and criminal justice system puts higher value on Israeli intelligence interests over prosecution of pederasts, and are willing and able to engage in perversions of justice and coordinate gaslighting of any public observers to implement this preference; (2) for the "there is nothing particularly fishy about Epstein" theory, the assumption that the above conjunction is wrong is load-bearing. The argument generally is one of compounding implausibility - "Epstein worked for Israeli intelligence" is an extraordinary claim, as is "the USG first sabotaged any legal means to stop him, and then killed him or arranged for him to kill himself when it could no longer be delayed", as is "the USG apparatus successfully conspired to maintain official denial the aforementioned facts", so a theory that requires the three of them to hold is extraordinary indeed - unless the three statements are not in fact independent, in which case the resulting probability may in the extreme case just almost equal the probability of the single proposition of "Epstein worked for Israeli intelligence" alone, which looks a lot better when weighed off against the "series of unfortunate events" null hypothesis.

tl;dr: his posited comparison is that in both cases, the USG had a tradeoff between "help Israeli intel" and "prosecute pedos" and chose the former.

tl;dr: his posited comparison is that in both cases, the USG had a tradeoff between "help Israeli intel" and "prosecute pedos" and chose the former.

Only if the former case was Israeli intel, which is the point under discussion.

Right, I think I addressed that in the longer paragraph above. At least as I remember it, the dismissal of Epstein being Israeli intel did implicitly rely on dismissing the joint probability of the entire theory. If there is in fact a positive correlation between "Israeli intel" and "pedo coverup conspiracy", the conditional evidence flow actually almost appears to reverse - rather than having "Epstein is Israeli intel & there was a pedo coverup conspiracy in his case" being especially unlikely because the two components are individually unlikely (or even more unlikely, if conspiracy theorists are posited to succumb to their usual temptation to see all conspiracy tropes the moment they catch a whiff of one), we now have P(Israeli intel | pedo coverup conspiracy) and P(pedo coverup conspiracy | Israeli intel) both greatly increased over the baseline probabilities, and evidence of either one also amounts to evidence of the other.

Not really. Assuming the maximalist realistic interpretations of both events are true, there is:

  • Epstein was part of an Israeli kompromat operation targeting powerful people that was covered up by the US government / CIA etc.

  • A senior Israeli official was caught in a sting operation and avoided a lengthy jail sentence because the US government let him go home under pressure from Israel.

It is doubtful that the sting op targeting some (other than this guy) randoms in Nevada involved targeting part of the same kind of operation as that alleged to be run by Epstein, although I suppose more will be revealed.

The second is a diplomatic incident where a senior foreign official is caught and then allowed to leave (like the Harry Dunn killing case), the first is an allegation about a blackmail scheme run by someone supposedly working for the government that employed the official in the second allegation. That they both involve sex crimes doesn’t really link them together.

Would this have even been a crime in Israel? Quick Googling shows that the age of consent in Israel is 16, but I didn't find any information about the age of the person Alexandrovich was contacting.

I ask because I don't think it's too uncommon for any allied country to exert pressure on behalf of a citizen or even for local officials to allow flight from jurisdiction when the sex crime in the US isn't a crime in the home country. I can't find anything to confirm the pattern, but I do remember a local case a couple decades ago in Colorado involving a Swiss citizen.

Age of consent is also 16 in Nevada. So presumably the alleged (most likely non-existent) minor was younger than that.

Hmmm, ok. So he was the only one released from jail while the other 7 caught in the same operation remained imprisoned and have already had court hearings, and his passport was not revoked, he was allowed to fly to Israel the next day... yet the U.S. government did not intervene. Well someone intervened, who did? Who made the decision and why?

The other 7 were denied bail?

According to Shaun King's sources:

lol

The press release claims they were charged with "Luring a Child with Computer for Sex Act". Likely NRS 201.560 1b, 4a. One to ten years, same as for statutory sexual seduction. Interestingly enough, using a computer is a mitigating circumstance, doing the same without a computer, network etc carries a penalty of two to 15 years.

So the cops posed as 15yo's or younger. Grown men going for sex with 15yo's is bad. I mean, it could be that the cops only implicitly mentioned their supposed age, as in, "I was $AGE when $EVENT happened", but otherwise I have no problem with this sting as far as I can tell. Depending on the specific circumstances, I think that a minimum sentence of a year is a bit harsh though. If a 15yo manages to get on tinder, she will likely find some adult guy willing to fuck her in very short order if she does not mention her age. Doing the same as a sting, with the only difference being that you mention the age will likely catch a steady supply of guys without changing the situation of the real minors one bit.

Of course, it could also be that these men were grooming what they thought to be 8yo's on Roblox or whatever, but cynically, that would be a lot more work per person caught, and also be a lot more impressive, so they would mention it in the press release.

--

The left will of course make hay with this story. Trump's handling of the Epstein case is already suspicious as fuck, so the narrative "MAGA leadership believes important people get to fuck 14yo's" is already there. Add to that the Israel connection, where the narrative of the left is that the US is bending over backwards to give Israel whatever they want. "Trump supports Israel murdering kids in Gaza, so why would he not support them raping kids in Vegas" or something.

Of course, the people who claim that Jews have an undue amount of influence will also make hay with this story. Jews ritually murdering Christian babies would probably fit better into their traditional narratives, but Jewish men getting away with sexual misconduct -- especially against minors -- is still a juicy story for their side.

On part of the Israeli guy, this seems a major failure of judgement. I mean, that guy was in fucking Vegas, and could not be arsed to hire a hooker who at least claimed to be 18? The obvious solution on Trump's and Nethanyahu's part would have been to just let him get convicted to the minimum sentence and put on probation after half a year. No cybersecurity expert should be worth this PR disaster.

No cybersecurity expert should be worth this PR disaster.

Optics! Think about the optics!

Maybe they feel that in modern time, when scandals come and go with lighting speed, when public with attention span of gnat stops caring once last hour's breaking news rolls out of screen, worrying about "optics" is no more necessary.

Maybe they are right.

Optics matter, sometimes. I vaguely recall reading on WP over some Eastern European government which fell because they pardoned someone who had been convicted in some orphanage child sex scandal.

Interestingly enough, using a computer is a mitigating circumstance, doing the same without a computer, network etc carries a penalty of two to 15 years.

At first glance this sounds wrong, but I'm not sure I'm actually upset that trying to "lure a child" IRL (effectively) is considered worse than typing into the Ethernet on a keyboard.

On part of the Israeli guy, this seems a major failure of judgement. I mean, that guy was in fucking Vegas, and could not be arsed to hire a hooker who at least claimed to be 18?

It's probably simple arrogance.


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